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Comment by hw | Hacker News Reader

It's disappointing when a company that's as well funded and big as Coinbase leaves customers hanging. I'm a co-founder at a customer conversations management and helpdesk platform - Re:amaze, and we answer _every_ single customer question and conversation on email, social and on our site that come our way. Every single one. Any that we can't answer right away we let them know we're working on it and set a reminder to get back to them once their issue has been investigated and resolved on our end. Every single employee at our company is responsible for making that happen, and we also help other businesses with the goal of a zero-inbox as well.

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

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I know, I started looking at the Coinbase subreddit for the first time last week and was just shocked. On "new" right now there are people who have waited for 4 months with no response, people with well over 10k locked up for over a month, people suffering from anxiety as a result of this company. Almost all of them have no responses beyond the automated message from a bot.

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!

It is wierd that companies are like this.

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?

Thanks for sharing your experience with GitLab support. I'm happy to follow up on your issue if you reference your ticket number.

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.

I see Drew from our team already responded but I want to also chime in.

> 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.

With all due respect, the scale of support enquiries you handle is probably orders of magnitude below what Coinbase has to deal with. Scaling any kind of support well is hard, scaling tech support for something as complicated and user-hostile as cryptocurrencies is harder.

Don’t take on the customers then.

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