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Comment by starklevnertz | Hacker News Reader

You’ve come to the right place!

This is where the Stripe CEO will reply to you when all their support processes have failed, and you have no other course to save your business. That’s the way all $122billion companies operate.

If he hasn’t been here yet, stay on hold he’ll be here soon.

Patrick? Catastrophic customer support fail call for you….

(Call waiting music….) Oh dear he’s on Christmas holidays. I’m pretty sure their automated processes suspended your account for good reason. If you feel this is not correct, email your case for why you should be allowed by us to have a working business to noreply@stripe.com

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I love that comment. This is how support is handled these days.

If you want to know whether a famous Windows audio app works on Surface X (ARM), just ask them on Twitter because the web site sucks and mails aren't replied. If you have an issue with your groceries, just call them out on Twitter because in the store they don't care. For big tech, use HN. Fine.

I personally don't see this as entirely a negative. If I have an issue usually I can just dm a company on twitter and I don't have to call anyone, deal with phone trees, or be there actively waiting for a response. I know this doesn't work well for folks that don't use twitter and it's definitely not a replacement for proper customer service. I do think it's a good addition to proper customer support, though.

> I personally don't see this as entirely a negative. If I have an issue usually I can just dm a company on twitter and I don't have to call anyone, deal with phone trees, or be there actively waiting for a response. I know this doesn't work well for folks that don't use twitter and it's definitely not a replacement for proper customer service. I do think it's a good addition to proper customer support, though.

Pivoting the angle on your perspective a bit:

"If a customer having a problem with our service isn't technical enough to backchannel us, they're not technical enough to be a viral thorn in our side."

To be clear, this is a process defect, and no company should aspire to build this into their processes as a feature. It's a net negative for absolutely everyone except perhaps you, me, and in the short term, the company. I'd argue it's a long term negative for you and me too as we hawk a service to others based on our current experiences, keeping the product from improving for everyone, including ourselves.

It could definitely (and is already) be a negative for some people. My hope is that support can become better and more async. By becoming async it becomes less "I get whoever I get when they answer the phone" and more "I get the support I actually need instead of being bounced around". I don't enjoy having to harass a company on twitter, I just hate it less than getting on the phone.

A good example of this is apple card support. You just text the support line. It's great because I don't need to wait on the phone. If someone doesn't have the info I need they can pass it on without me needing to know about it. I can continue my day without making a chore out of something. This is the part I was trying to highlight (not the reduced access to support).

i agree with you that async support is great, but chatbots and email have been there for a while. What is infuriating with Twitter is that it's basically one rule for the "powerful" (those who are on twitter and have followers/subscribers/whatever) and one for the others

I think the downvotes are because the comment you replied to stated

> This is how support is handled these days.

... with an implied all other things are dropped/neglected and you replied with

> I personally don't see this as entirely a negative.

I fully agree with your point that companies being available on social media, but your first comment can be read as supporting that other avenues are dropped and that's clearly a negative. The grandparent clearly replied to that reading of your comment.

Yeah, I just meant to say that as a user of twitter it's nice to be able to find most companies and message them in one central place instead of dealing with phones, chatbots, etc. I'm definitely not advocating for removing phone or email support.

While I am not a fan of Amazon for other reasons, their chat support has been always outstanding for me.

refunds are sublime

Really? The last several times I've tried to contact support I have only been able to "chat" with some limited functionality chatbot that was clearly narrowly programmed for a few use cases.

No option to reach a human by phone, chat, email. It felt pretty awful.

Edit: I should clarify that I mean Amazon retail. I don't use AWS, but I imagine it has much better support.

I've never had an issue getting in touch with a human on Amazon. On the contact us page there's even an option for them to call you. Enter your phone number and they usually call in under a minute. This option is available in the UK at least.

Maybe that's a UK regulation? I just tried navigating the maze of a customer service site from the US again and can't find any apparent way to contact a human.

Edit: I should clarify that I mean Amazon retail. I don't use AWS, but I imagine it has much better support.

I am from Canada and always had good experience with retail support.

Just ask in chat for a human after reaching a dead end.

I have to agree. At a place I do work at I've contacted AWS support twice using their email support ticket system. Both times were quite pleasant.

Where pleasant in this case is the person replying took the time to read the words you wrote and confirmed that by prefacing most sentences with "so I see you're trying to do xyz", followed by a thorough and well thought out response with references and suggestions.

So many times I've emailed other places (multi-million dollar companies) where it's painfully clear the person replying didn't read anything and some tool scanned my email for keywords which they auto-replied with even though the response makes no sense based on what I wrote. Then it takes additional days and back and forths to get to the point where they understand the original email that was written, in which case it gets "escalated" to another support team / tier within the organization where the process starts again.

> This is how support is handled these days.

These days? When was this not a standard practice for the financial industry?

Most of the time when a bank (or similar) decides to close your account they literally can’t even discuss the reasons with you without putting themselves in jeopardy.

It's anti money laundering regulation, and yes under no circumstances are you allowed to tip off the client that he's being investigated. You are literally obligated to lie if they ask and say there's an undetermined hold-up or something like that. If you don't you become criminally liable, even if the customer is found to not have broken any laws.

Work for a hedge fund under both US and UK regulatory authority.

In practice this also makes it rather challenging to discuss non-AML issues with clients, because if you’re always willing to discuss non-AML issues it quickly becomes clear which issues are AML issues.

The Stripe CEO was on HN before stripe was even a thing. This comment is disgusting on so many levels. In other companies the CEO wouldn't even give you the time of day whereas with Stripe if something goes wrong in their processes, which given the size of that company is by now inevitable there is at least one way in which you can try to correct this.

Obviously, it would be great if nothing ever went wrong. It would be better still if Stripe had a couple of thousand people manning the phones over Christmas. But automation can and does fail and I figure that by now anybody that decides to farm out a critical portion of their business to a large company is able to figure out for themselves that such a dependency has risks as well as benefits.

It still sucks for the OP, but your characterization, using a novelty account at that, is below the belt, especially on a one-sided story that appears to have plenty left out.

Why is the comment so unfair though? It's true that for many companies, customer support is a joke in poor taste compared to the profits brought in by said customers. And "appeal through HN" often seems like the only solution that will get you unstuck.

I think this event, and many others (and Stripe is very far from being the worse of the lot - looking at you Apple & Google) shows that these companies simply do not value their customers' peace of mind and are perfectly happy to send automated notices and perform automated takedowns without a (relevantly informed & powerful enough to act) human in the loop, and without the possibility of a meaningful appeal (that gives actual reasons and not "you have violated policies").

Automation can fail, but this begs the question of why this is automated in the first place, given the consequences. This is also not a business bringing in 100$ per month (though I will argue they also deserve respect, but I understand if they're not giving quite the same care as business bringing in hundreds of thousands or millions).

> I figure that by now anybody that decides to farm out a critical portion of their business to a large company is able to figure out for themselves that such a dependency has risks as well as benefits.

This is a disingenuous argument in general. If cars were much more unsafe than they are, would you also blame car crash victim for driving a car knowing what the risks are?

We can certainly blame a person for using an unsafe mode of transport. Is that up for debate?

My point is mostly that it shouldn't be used to argue against increased security for that mode of transportation.

The pattern is as follows:

- A: I had a really bad accident, we should make these vehicles more secure. - B: No, you had to be aware that it was risky.

- A: Stripe jeopardized our business, they really should have better customer support for these cases. - B: No, you had to be aware it was risky to use them.

It's a non-sequitur: the plight for increased security/customer support is in no way hampered by the fact that the buyer had to be aware of the risk (which I guess he had, but ... so what?).

> This comment is disgusting on so many levels.

“Disgusting” is a hilariously strong word to use against someone trying to hold a 100B+ company to a little heat and get attention to their cause.

“Assume positive intent” is a facade for “don’t assume negative intent” - but that doesn’t mean we should dip into the good-will bucket for every company spokesperson here.

No, but for the Collison brothers I'll be happy to make an exception, I have yet to see any interaction between them and others where they did not go out of their way to make things right and they come across as super nice, both before and after their success.

If you want to go after the CEOs of other 100B+ companies be my guest, they usually are jerks. But in this very specific case that is not so.

Then make it for HN comments and posters.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Last time Patrick was on HN customer support duty:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28522784

Yeah and it worked last time. As a Stripe customer myself with way less revenue than OP, I worry about this a lot. How can any sane company terminate any client with revenue (any size) without having been in contact to sort issues before hand or if not possible, to terminate them with a grace period?

This is insanity.

You don't know what the OP has left out of their post. I am pretty sure Stripe didn't terminate a major customer like that overnight because some admin or bot got bored.

Correct, but they stated they're in delayed fulfillment within the travel vertical.

Google often does that to Google play developers so I don’t see why stripe can’t?

Did anyone notice if Paypal CEO is also hanging here?

That would be nice to know, our non profit organization is struggling to get a Braintree account enabled and their customer support just doesn't answer us.

We used Braintree and during the time they were bought out by PayPal and all th terrible PayPal support was integrated. We could never reach a live person at Braintree again and ended up switching processors.

It's scary to think a processor can't answer a phone call but hold your entire business' money in their hands.

For what it's worth, we recently tried to get a new Braintree account set up (this summer) and ended up in the same situation. After a few months of trying to get in touch with them, a coworker of mine was told that Braintree is being integrated into PayPal and is no longer accepting new customers. We ultimately had no other choice than to switch payment processors.

Thanks for the information. Looks like we will need to look at another payment processor and adapts our code to it...

HN isn’t a place for this sort of rhetoric. From the guidelines: Don't be snarky.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

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