Sorry, upgrading your Dropbox Business plan will take 11 months

>Remember: Companies that have great responses on social media don't have great support, just attentive marketing.

On other side may be they just streamlined the operations and the social media is the [only] customer case support database. If you look at various bug/case/issue databases with issue voting, discussions, etc - they do start to look like social media. So there is some convergence here. And may be Twitter can pivot and add issues/case priority/severity, release fixed in and other fields :) Imagine Periscope allowing to observe developers fixing your issues...

>For every case that has a great resolution after coverage on twitter/facebook/hacker news/local news station there's a hundred that languished unsolved and customer screwed.

sounds like my BugZilla, in principle if not in actual numbers :)

I think nowadays, social media support and traditional support system are well integrated into their CRM.

I complain about things on twitter once in a while, if the company has social media presence (e.g. Comcast, for example) I find it tend to be quicker and straightforward to resolve issues.

With other options (phone and chat) it tend to be little more hassle to jump through the hoops to actually get the conversation going of someone.

They didn't even have a great response on social media. They just requested a DM and said they updated the ticket.

> To the credit of which ever Dropbox person responded

Glad to see it takes screaming in the streets to get reasonable customer service for a paid product

> Just off the cuff thinking would suggest applying whatever money has already been paid for the existing account, prorating it for what has been already used, and then subtract that from the fee to be collected for the upgrade. Then flip the switch in the database. Sure, it might be out-of-bounds for normal workflow.

My previous employer did something like this. If you currently had the $8/month plan for 12 months and chose to switch to the $20/month plan, you'd get it instantly but with (8/20) * your remaining time, e.g. 4.8 months if you had 12 months left. (This also worked the other way round for plan downgrades.) Then when it came time to renew you'd pay a new 12-month subscription fee for a full 12 months.

It's a very elegant and convenient system. Choose the wrong plan by mistake at time of payment? Want to try the premium plan? You can switch instantly without entering any payment details, and without the provider having an extra payment card fee to stomach.

> That's ridiculous that Dropbox has never thought that someone might need an upgrade to their account before their next "open-enrollment" style system. Just off the cuff thinking would suggest applying whatever money has already been paid for the existing account, prorating it for what has been already used, and then subtract that from the fee to be collected for the upgrade. Then flip the switch in the database. Sure, it might be out-of-bounds for normal workflow.

Seriously, I implemented this in a few minutes on my crappy little side project.

If you want to downgrade, it's "contact support" so we discuss any issues and sort out a refund or credit as appropriate - but if you want to upgrade and pay more, that should be the fattest, shiniest, most automatic button available and give a fair, prorated deal with no hassle, those are customers who have experience with your service, like it and want more of it. The kind you want to keep the most. It seems like the most basic business sense.

I can see why it's hard - they probably use a third party payment processor which does subscriptions, and those processors don't tend to allow you to change the amount or timing of a subscription once authorized.

To do this switch, they would need to bill the extra amount each month until the end of the existing subscription, and then start a new subscription for the full amount later.

Starting that subscription later would probably require the customer to come back to the site many months later to authorize the new amount.

Or maybe: A single support representative misunderstood the request/policy and made an incorrect reply?

Wait, I'm much more curious what are you guys gonna do now? Sure, Dropbox screwed up and they can't give you more than 25000 API calls per month this year, because their system is poorly designed and not ready. But are you capable of overcoming the issue that now you have no programmatic connection to your cloud? I'm genuinely very curious.

My daughter wanted a subscription to the New Yorker for her birthday.

There were some promotions on their website (not some shady magazine broker). After going through all the motions, they happily tell you that you can expect the first issue in your mailbox about 3 months later... 3 months.

How is that possible?

As a non-business but paying user, I had the opposite experience. They spammed me with over 10 emails "warning" me that my Dropbox subscription was about to expire, oh and also casually hinted the business plan was "better", even though I don't use anywhere close to the 1TB. Which of course made me cancel/not renew.

As much as a hate to say this, but their tech is solid and isn't the problem. It seems to be figuring out what the value-add is for different groups, and how to market it effectively. Or maybe cloud storage is saturated and not that interesting. (The size of SSDs also doesn't help for individual accounts which is either 1TB or nothing.)

This, this, this, this

Every business bureaucracy should be evaluated under this metric. "Are we making it harder for people to pay us? Are we making it harder for people to pay us more money?"

And no, never make it harder for customers to pay you less or to stop paying you. It's short term thinking; a customer who has a painful experience when they want to stopping paying you is a customer who will think twice about paying you again.

Some more detailed examples for that list of reasons: "you can't give us more money before a sales representative had a chance to upsell you even further, sorry they are all unavailable right now", and of course the personalized variant: "... before the sales representative who called dibs on your business had a chance to upsell you even further" (in that case you might even get deliberately stalled because the transaction volume might be more valuable in the next reporting interval, or the one after. All metrics will be gamed). A properly incentivized sales org would sooner run the company to the ground than allow themselves to get bypassed for even a single transaction.

This. I have always said the #1 job of a for-profit company should be extracting money from the customers wallets, and it should be as frictionless as possible. But no - examples abound of companies that seem to hate money, as you say.

I have been trying to pay Netlify for about a year now. Their TIN still doesn't match their invoices and we a have been unable to pay. It's totally crazy to me.

You're not kidding. I recently booked a Disney trip for the family and ran into issues at every single stage. First, there was a problem with the airfare not displaying the proper pricing. Then I was told that I had to remove the airfare and book that separately as that was the only way I could continue online booking. When I went to pay, there was a problem with their payment system that took 24 hours to resolve (it was on their side, to be clear, not a bank issue on my side). Then I had to get someone to fix the itinerary within my account because it was all messed up. After that, there was some issue with my account and I got mysteriously locked out for no apparent reason (no, I did not enter the wrong password). And then just today, at 7 AM I became eligible to register for FastPass events now that I was inside the 60 day window for the trip. Logged on right at 7 AM and sure enough, FastPass registrations were the only thing not working on the site. Spoke to chat support and they confirmed it was site-wide and the same thing happened the previous day. They fixed it within an hour and I was finally able to register for the events, but literally every step along the way there was an issue. I expect way more from a $170B company, especially one which families give thousands of dollars to at a time. The fact that I literally couldn't give them money for a full 24 hours and had to spend about 4 hours on the phone over two days to figure out and resolve with them is absolutely mind-blowing.

Yah, just had this experience with amazon in Australia. They've decided that you can only buy things from Amazon oz, but they don't stock half the stuff. I bought an instant pot from amazon UK a year or so ago and wanted to get one for my daughter. Nope can't do that any more, sent Jeff an email, got some gobbledy gook about how the taxes have to be collected for Australia now so they can't do that overseas. Yet I used to buy from Amazon US and used an Alabama address, they seemed able to apply US state based taxes without any problem. Not only do they refuse to sell things to me but they it seems they lie about the reason. Bought it from somewhere else, Amazon is now my last choice if I can't get it anywhere else.

DropBox support had already replied to this tweet 13 minutes before it was even submitted to /new, much less reached the front page.

[edited for clarity]

acting once the kangaroo court has been invoked, and after pitchforks primed to push the company ever so slightly towards the flaming stake of public shame are drawn, is not impressive.

getting support right the first time should be news. consumerist style resolution is at best neutral, and at worst still disappointing.

Advice like this is always funny to me. It's kind of like being upset about the low quality of vegetables at the super market and being asked why you don't just grow your own in your backyard.

I'm sure anyone who is technology savvy could switch to Nextcloud easily enough, but that isn't the point. Dropbox was probably chosen because the money is worth the convenience.

If you don't have hangups about Microsoft you can also get Onedrive - 1 TB for ~$5/month, and they even throw in Office if you want it. Files On Demand also seems to work pretty well on Windows 10 boxes and is included, I think the Dropbox equivalent is only on the business plans.

Yes... But it still takes 7 seconds to load!

They now have a 2TB plan. It costs twice as much. Ironically, this is exactly what I asked for, but that was 3 years ago and since they couldn’t do it back then, I made other arrangements, and now that it’s finally available I don’t need it.