I can't imagine that it had anything to do with bad publicity from being on the front page of Hacker News... anyway, I'm glad it was finally resolved. Thanks HN.
It's pathetic that nowadays the only way to get the attention of a company is to shame them in a public forum. While I'm not a big social media fan myself, I'm glad it's there when we need it to call out people and companies like this.
This is the only reason that "Kyle" reached out to you, not because they care about you as a customer. It's a shame really.
Since most HNers will see through the whole - popular HN rant -> resolved and see it a cynical they should perhaps not also solve the issue but make a statement about how they plan to solve other people who have been waiting this long.
Otherwise the message is clear: If you aren't happy, shame us publicly, then you are #1 in the caller queue.
More and more it’s the only lane.
> Good to know for other Coinbase customers.
Public shaming on a tech forum or social media should never be a viable channel for consumer support. It’s a symptom of the breakdown of all other channels.
I’ve done this a handful of times when I’ve gotten the runaround after being polite and following the rules.
But damn, one would think that there's a ticket-age view somewhere in the triage process. I wonder whether five months isn't that unusual.
Its sooner or later posts like OP will be instantaneously deleted not to create too much shaming.
Just plain inexcusable that it takes one HN article to get things resolved.
BTW, you're not the only one with these issues. There are a number of complaints from people in the same boat as you on Reddit as well
I sometimes stick up for giant tech companies when people I know (usually academics) talk about how they're inhumane or evil. I tend to think that people on the whole mean well, and that, since these companies are, after all, composed of people who generally mean well, we should give them the benefit of the doubt. The principle of charity and all that.
But Coinbase really does seem to be the rotten apple in the barrel. They are hands down the most inhumane company I've ever interacted with. I came away from this whole thing feeling scared about a future in which this type of behavior by corporations is the norm - I keep thinking about Snowcrash or that scene in Elysium where Matt Damon is getting shocked by the police robot!
I love everything else about Gitlab yet I am having a less than stellar time with Gitlab support.
Is it because for most companies the perception is that if someone needs support they are already more likely to be a bad / lost customer anyway so don't put too much effort into it?
> Is it because for most companies the perception is that if someone needs support they are already more likely to be a bad / lost customer anyway so don't put too much effort into it?
This is definitely not the case. Support is an opportunity to win a customer for life because it's a make or break moment during the customer experience.
At GitLab I realized that we need to build specialized support groups with specific focuses: On-prem and Services.
I'm currently on-boarding a Services Support Manager this week who's focus will be improving the Services support experience. Your comments here echo that it was the right choice to continue investing in our support as it's not where it needs to be.
To loop this back to Coinbase the thing to realize is traditionally companies treat support as a cost of doing business not a revenue generating asset.
In the tech support industry rule of thumb is 18 months until burnout. 18 months until someone leaves your support team on average. I'm sure coinbases turnover is somewhere around that or less with a 5 month backlog.
At GitLab we are trying to buck that industry trend, but we are still in the early stages. Time will tell.
We absolutely want to help every customer have a good experience. When we fail at that we want to do everything possible to turn it around. I look forward to helping you.
It has everything to do with this. Glad your issue was resolved, cos I was going to suggest you post on r/cryptocurrency and r/coinbase on etc reddit.com
That's the place to post your issues on. All the major exchanges like Kraken, Bitstamp, GDAX (Coinbase) magically respond and sort the issue out once the post hits the main page.
Eventually someone suggested to write an angry tweet about them... it seemed stupid but I was out of ideas. I did it and they immediately reached out and paid for it in full. I often wonder how many people never think to complain in public and get screwed.
Allegedly now that many banks/credit card companies have cut off crypto exchanges that the only way to cash out is to match your SELL order with somebody buying in....
And now we have this whole USDT fiasco...Tether has actually overtaken the "how to buy bitcoin" google searches...
https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=now%207-d&q=bu...
I don't know that this is fully accurate. Most exchanges support some amount of self-service withdrawal without KYC verification into private crypto wallets.
Where you do need someone to match your sell order is when you convert back out to fiat currency. But if you're on one of the "trusted" providers here like Coinbase (I recognize the irony of saying this in this thread, but they're still an American company that can't commit blatant fraud a la BitConnect or BitGrail) or Gemini, you should be able to send them cyrptocoins out of your "sketchy" exchange and eventually get fiat.