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Comment by ryandrake | Hacker News Reader

This reminds me of “The Computer Won’t Let Me” problem with many companies’ customer support lines. You call about some edge case problem, like your modem’s MAC addressed was entered wrong by the installer tech (not a real example but whatever). The support agent would like to help you, but your problem is sufficiently off the normal rails that the agent can’t manually correct it. The field is not editable on his screen, and that’s that. The process won’t allow them to fix it. This happens a lot with billing errors. An exceptional outage happens and the agent wants to help but they can’t because the Holy Computer was programmed to not trust customer support to adjust people’s bills. I’m sorry, Dave, but I’m afraid I cannot do that.

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True story. Happened over the last couple of weeks.

    Me: Kraken, I'd like to recover my old account I created years ago.
    Kraken support: Sure, just login from the same computer and IP.
    Me: I can't, I no longer have either of those things.
    Kraken: How did our customer service go?
    Me: It didn't.
    Kraken: We can fix it, just login to zoom from the same computer and IP...

    Ad nauseam, ad infinitum.

On the bright side, you no longer have an account with a wildly incompetent company. Same IP? Unless you are on a campus with statically allocated addresses or something...

I hope you're making this up. My spidery sense tells me that a random company cannot verify the IP I access zoom from. (Unless kraken was zoom itself presumably)

Kraken is a cryptocurrency exchange so it's plausible that someone's years-inactive account actually is worth a small fortune (to the customer, and to any hacker).

More importantly it's worth a small fortune to kraken if not claimed by the customer.

Their financial incentives aren't aligned with customers.

Ahh, escheat, a word I just learned on here yesterday. haha

Ok but how can they check that you "login to zoom from the same IP"?

And that's my concern. I can't remember if there's a fractional bitcoin sitting around in a kraken wallet. Even if it's 1/10th of a bitcoin, that's enough to spend a little time trying to get it back.

Hah. Why would I bother spinning some fantasy about Kraken's terrible support? Sadly, it's all true.

Sounds about right.

I blundered my home address when initially setting up my cable internet installation. The installer called from the other house and I redirected him. He told me just to call customer service to have it corrected.

Multiple attempts, there is no way to change the billing/service address of an open account. Web says to call, customer service agent says to use web..

I've set to paperless billing and figure for any service visit, the tech will call me confused from 2 doors down and I will redirect them. Easy enough. Two year going now, so far so good.

Have you tried telling them you are moving from the incorrect address to the correct address?

I can see someone overlooking the need to support address corrections because that is probably a rare case, but customers moving within the company's service area and wanting to have service at the new address surely is common enough that they cannot have overlooked supporting that.

> I can see someone overlooking the need to support address corrections because that is probably a rare case

In my experience working working in tech support at a company that encouraged us to fix whatever we could do like as, service address and billing address changes occured everyday,multiple times a day.

At the time I was there that ISP had fewer than 200,000 customer, wasn't even one of the big players at the time.

Intenode in Australia, based in Adelaide, circa 2004 through 2010.

Hi, I was an internode customer from 2009-2016. Great company, great service, even though being competent with tech I never really used support (I think like 2 times during the time). Still the times I did use it there was always a very positive attitude from support.

I'm still a customer today, although now my service is delivered via NBN FTTH, I don't really see much differentiation in the market.

When I first started working at Intenode, tech support was still solely on the third floor of 132 Grenfell Street, and you would occasionally bump in to Simon Hackett in the lift.

I was still there when iiNet acquired the company, but left before TPG acquired iiNet.

Good times.

I still would be a customer if it wasn't for the fact that I left Australia.

That actually sounds like an amazing way to get another year of introductory pricing

I assumed this would trigger a on-site service call unnecessarily so didn't want to open that can of worms..

That's deliberate.

It's cheaper. If they don't let their customer service agents have any autonomy, then they don't have to hire for things like 'judgement' and can just throw warm bodies in a chair, which makes people easy to replace and cheap to employ. It also prevents your cheapness from causing issues; if you hire decent people and rely on them, then it causes issues if those people leave en masse or start siding with your customers over you. "Sure, Mrs. Johnson, I'll forgive last month's bill; they don't pay enough managers to check and I'm quitting tomorrow what do I care?"

Some of this is a guardrail against social engineering. They can have an armada of minimally-trained level 1 support telling people they need to plug in their modem for it to work. Anything unusual they encounter can be appropriately reviewed by people who will understand the issue and not suffer from the confused deputy problem.

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