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Comment by mv4 | Hacker News Reader

It's been over a month for me. My case hasn't been touched, except for one automated "read the FAQ" update. Lost my ETH transaction.

Thousands are having the same issue (lack of support), based on Twitter alone.

Tweeting at the CEO is useless, unless you're someone famous.

The really sad part - with the amount of money they are making ($1B/yr), they should be able to handle support. It's only several categories (account verification, transfer delays, lost transactions) that can be easily parsed/routed, and even answered to, programmatically in 80% of cases.

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I actually founded a company that does ML-based customer service alongside humans. https://www.abotlabs.com

If anybody at Coinbase wants to reach out, I can probably automate 20-50% of your queries with integrations into your backend systems. Email is in my profile.

Awesome, I'd love it if you could help Coinbase resolve poor OPs problem swiftly and economically with the warm friendly response of a robotic rejection.

Yeah, I'm sure that "instant replies" are exactly what CoinBase customers are longing for. /s

They already have a chat with instant replies...that point you to a website with the answer they should have just linked you to when you went searching for the answer. I had to go through this rigamarole to reset my 2FA because my phone had to be reset and I didn't have backups of my Google Authenticator keys. The process went something like this:

1. Search docs for how to deal with lost 2FA device. Find entry about it.

2. Docs say, "contact support to blah blah blah" with a link to a realtime chat thing for support.

3. Ask question in chat thing.

4. Receive a link to a web page with a description of what to do from the chat bot

5. Follow those instructions, which involve logging in with a different browser (or incognito) and clicking "lost my device".

6. Verify identity, etc. etc. which finally gets the ball rolling on fixing the problem, which takes a couple of days, as I think it actually involves a human at this point, though I never actually talked to one.

It wasn't super painful, but it made me think, "What idiot came up with this? Why would I want to talk to chat bot only to have it take me to the web page that it should have directed me to in the first place when I was looking at the documentation?"

My initial comment wasn't clear. My point was - there are tens of thousands of open, unanswered cases there. But it's only a handful of distinct categories. Meaning cases can be programmatically categorized, and handled by Support employees in batches. I've done tech support before, and you can make a small team very effective with some organization and good automation.

Also, don't underestimate an importance of a ticket update (any update). If you observe a few open cases on Reddit or Twitter, you will see that the worst thing you can do is say nothing - no ETA, not even an acknowledgement... it's the complete silence that makes people freak out and open multiple cases, spam multiple channels, only aggravating the problem.

> I actually do ML-based customer service.

An alternative business model: An ML-based recommender for Coinbase's customers for how best to obtain satisfaction.

The revenue model would be a little harder to design, but you might help more deserving people.

So far, the most effective way for a CB customer to obtain satisfaction has been calling out a CB employee on Reddit by name (who also happen to be active Reddit users) with a case number, at which point said employee personally looks at the issue and provides an update.

With what did you integrate yet? I'm looking for a solution like ecommerce in different languages

We integrate into most of the major eCommerce platforms and automate common tasks out-of-the-box: returns, exchanges, order tracking, etc. We support multiple languages.

Shoot me an email and I'll see if we can help.

I'm in the same situation. I'd even be willing to pay a much higher transaction fee for them to resolve it, but they don't seem to care. I switched to Gemini and have been much happier with them.

I lost my eth transaction when I wanted to buy at around $180...still waiting to hear back from them about my purchase that went through but then mysteriously didn't.

They're in the process of ramping up pretty seriously I think. http://fortune.com/2018/01/22/coinbase-tina-bhatnager-twitte...

Hah. They've been "ramping up" for over a year now.

That message has been pushed all through 2017.

"Ramping up" explains many days of delays. It does not explain many MONTHS of delays.

Bot support sucks. Revolut is a case study in this #fail. Make things clear and idiot proof is a better path to avoiding time answering simple questions. I missed the days of some human on the end of a mechanical turk task copy and pasting some loosely related canned answer when with dealing with bots.

With Revolut at least you can just pay for better support; with most services you cannot.

Totally agree. Bot support is one of the worst things you can do for your customers. Especially in Coinbase's case where there's $ involved, auto bot responses piss off customers wanting their $ in time.

AI is a long way from being at the forefront of customer support. At best AI works well as a complementary tool for customer support agents to help their customers, but not be the customer support agent itself.

What Coinbase needs to do is shore up their support team.

get a linkedin premium for trial and inmail one of the top level executives.

This has been tried, to no avail.

I ended up speaking with one of their board members.

Public humiliation trumps private escalation.

There's really no excuse for a 5 month old customer facing ticket with real notable amounts of money involved. I'd be sorely embarrassed, and it appears they are.

At the very least they need a sensible way to separate issues involving real money to be in a different priority bucket with actual escalation.

Just give a shit about all inquiries, or pack it in.

My time should now be deprioritized?

Google seems to have been successful at separating which customers get actual support and which don't. I get your viewpoint, but not many tech companies seem to support it.

Does anyone still read inmails, really?

$1B? That’s insane. I know I know the transaction fee... but wow. So many startups like Dropbox can’t even make $1B for a long time until recently.

Sounds like a lot but if we are in a bubble like I and lots of other people think we are, then that could come crashing down at any time.

Money laundering ain't no joke!

They are going to lose their reign if this keeps up. Seems like it's time for them to shift focus.

I am in the same boat and have had my personal health deteriorate because of this.

Don't gamble with your personal health. Please try to find professional support.

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