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Comment by edwinwee | Hacker News Reader

Sorry for the issues here—could you email me at edwin@stripe.com?

We did that last time you offered and never heard back.

Well, I'll respond if and when I hear something. I've gotten a confirmation response email from Edwin at the very least.

Update: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32558191#32558635

Ah, sorry, may have missed it—could you forward and put your HN username in the subject?

I've had the same experience with Edwin. When I published an article critical of Stripe that reached the front page of HN,[0] he was very helpful and set up a direct phone call for us to talk. Edwin said many times on the call that if I ever ran into a situation where I seemed to be getting the runaround from Stripe support, I could contact him to get things unstuck.

A month later, I ran into an issue where the Stripe API contradicted the API documentation. I contacted support, and support told me that it's intended behavior for the API to violate its own documentation. I emailed Edwin since that seemed like the exact scenario he volunteered to help with, and he didn't respond. I followed up a week later, and he didn't respond.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22936818

This is not a serious way to run a business. Unless ypu’re google.

Letting customers slip through the cracks of the traditional support channels is a bad indicator obviously, but what's the problem with keeping an eye on social media channels in addition to the traditional channels? Why is that not a "serious way to run a business"?

Why is that not a "serious way to run a business"?

Rather than trying to solve the problem of "customers having serious problems", listening to HN and replying here says "we only really care about people being critical of our product in public; we don't actually care about the underlying issue people are criticising us about." It's not real support if Joe Random can't access it without knowing the secret formula.

Support-by-HN-replies is theatre, even if it works sometimes.

I'm not really suggesting Stripe are guilty of this. Stripe support has actually been fine for me in the past.

Because it's too easy to be bad at that as well. Just look at the thread where "Edwin" (I use quotes because it may or may not actually be Edwin) says "sorry, hit me up" and then the repsonse is "bitch, we did but you never replied back" (emphasis mine, but it was there if you read between the lines).

Now, "Edwin" looks even more pathetic and bot like

Here's a thought: treat your customers better so you don't have to do damage control when one of your customers finds a big enough audience.

For every person who gets an HN post/comment with traction, there's a thousand people with no voice or platform just as fucked over or more.

Why is complaining on HN necessary to get proper customer support?

Because otherwise you have no leverage. If you go through proper channels your request for help will sit rotting in a queue until someone decides to pick up the ticket.

If you complain loudly and publicly in a popular forum, everyone’s opinion of the company will degrade the longer your cries go visibly unanswered, so it requires immediate attention. Your request gets elevated to critical.

I understand this position but after going from support-intensive startup to FAANG, the difference is scale subtly tipping the balance in small ways.

There's no equivalent for "overhearing a customer problem" at FAANG scale.

It would be dramatically inefficient for software engineers / product managers / those implementing functionality to triage all support tickets.

About 0.5% of support tickets are interesting enough to be a case study the way this user has offered. At both large and small scale.

> at FAANG scale and it would be dramatically inefficient for software engineers / product managers / those implementing functionality to triage all support tickets

In other words, human labor would be too costly. It not a FAANG thing either, the government does it just as well as most other big entities that are betting they can let some problems slip through without too much loss.

Not too costly, just cuts into CxO salary, shareholders value and stuff. The line must go up!

There, trivially, aren't enough software engineers on the planet to assign one to every incoming support inquiry.

Not all problems require software engineers. Just having someone to filter the appropriate problem to the appropriate person is sufficient. For example,

> but also slashed our corporate card limits with no explanation and refused to restore them despite our bank writing letters supporting our position.

Even a response stating “we do not have the capacity to resolve your issue” is acceptable.

Getting black holed or wasting hours of customers’ time in phone trees and getting passed around is not acceptable.

While I agree with your comment I'm not sure how I would feel receiving such a message as a paying customer.

Would you feel better being passed around for hours, with the same result? If they can't solve the issue, I would rather know it early and move on.

I think the admiral asked a rhetorical question.

"Top Gun: Maverick" reference.

Why do people expect everyone to understand their film references?

That's like asking why people don't explain jokes. You get it or you don't. Not everything is meant for you.

It’s a filtering mechanism. If you get it, you’re a cool guy worth talking to. If not, maybe bugger off.

Cool people watch mainstream commercial cinema?

I'm happy to tell anyone who thinks this way that THEY should bugger off.

A random movie reference can be expected to not caught by anyone more than 10 years different from you in age, or who is from a different culture. You will also miss some mavericks like me who really don't care much about a lot of popular culture.

If you value matching on those criteria over, say, knowing about something interesting, then I'm happy to ignore you.

Given the tone of your post, it is clear the original filtering mechanism was sufficient.

Given the films you're comfortable judging people on not having memorized, I'm glad you're self-selecting yourself away from people too!

Apparently so. If your idea of good conversation is endlessly repeating the same nostalgic popular culture references, then you've discovered that you don't want to talk to me, and I've discovered that I don't want to talk to you. We've both come to conclusions that make our lives better.

But that begs the question of why you'd bother seeking out a forum whose entire purpose is conversations that you're apparently not interested in. Why not seek out like-minded people whose conversational interests match yours more closely?

I understand most references that are posted on this forum. Perhaps it is you who is out of place. Are you even aware that references are being made? Perhaps not, how could you be? You don’t know what you don’t know.

I'm in https://news.ycombinator.com/leaders. If I don't belong here, a lot of people are rather confused.

...it's not even a good, or properly aged, film!

HN, you're getting weird.

As someone who worked as front-line support and turned into the authority who's asked to resolve complex cases, this is nonsense. They aren't playing Tetris ignoring the queue. It's more likely the front-line staff are overwhelmed and/or don't know how to cut through the corporate hoops/politics to find and deliver the fix, and/or too shy/embarrassed to admit ignorance and having to pass it to the higher-ups for someone who knows how to fix things. It's more likely going in circles because they want to resolve it within their levels without having to escalate it.

As someone who has worked front-line support: large companies like Stripe purposefully don't create paths in the customer support scripts for resolving issues they don't want to. They're not stupid or blind, they listen to the calls and know these issues crop up. They don't care. Having support staff deal with weird/unusual problems is expensive, more expensive than just having those customers put up with it, or go away and become someone else's problem.

Don't blame minimum wage earners for barriers intentionally thrown up by management to reduce labor costs.

> Don't blame minimum wage earners

If that's directed at me, I am not blaming anyone. Chill. I'm saying it's a human thing.

Posting on a popular forum seems to short-circuit all that and get actual results probably because it starts making some executive squirm.

If I'm running a business and losing money because your service is fubar I really don't give a damn that you're all too busy or too ignorant to solve the problem. I'm going to do what I know works and that's basically blast over HN/Twitter/Reddit that your service sucks and has been broke for X duration.

You're right that a customer shouldn't care the staff are too busy or too ignorant. You're also right in how complaining online short-circuits all that to actually receive help. I continuously advocate for the presence of path to higher levels and short-circuits! But it isn't always "the employee of company X responded to me on HN because my post made an executive squirm!" Some people just care and willing to lend a hand in cases where they can help.

> Some people just care and willing to lend a hand in cases where they can help.

Why don't they (whoever at the company is in a position to make a difference) care before there is bad publicity? It's either incompetence or indifference. krisoft left another comment already that explains it quite well. There is little - if any - reason to give Stripe the benefit of the doubt here, and there are a lot of reasons to believe it's intentional.

When the cost of getting a new customer is the same or less than the cost of dealing with a problematic existing customer, they will become very indifferent. They do not care.

> They aren't playing Tetris ignoring the queue.

Nobody said that.

> likely the front-line staff are overwhelmed

Which means that the company knowingly and intentionally decided to skimp on support, or have other policies which lead to their staff being overwhelmed.

> don't know how to cut through the corporate hoops/politics to find and deliver the fix

Which means the corporation decided to skimp on their training and or efforts to streamline the issue resolution.

> and/or too shy/embarrassed to admit ignorance and having to pass it to the higher-ups for someone who knows how to fix things

Same as above.

> It's more likely going in circles because they want to resolve it within their levels without having to escalate it.

And why is that? Ah yes, because the company knowingly and intentionally set the incentives as such.

I don’t have a problem with the front line support. They are just humans like you and me. But I will have zero pitty on companies who under allocate resources to their problems and then try to hide behind their overworked support line as some meat shield.

Because that’s 90% of reason why tech startups are profitable. Not by having better product than competition, but buy gutting customer support, which is super expensive AND doesn’t scale.

And it works until it doesn’t.

Done.

Would OP please consider updating this thread with the outcome of the email exchange. Seems too easy to pop into every complaint thread and act busy. Would love to know if your problem is actually resolved

Yes, I will certainly do so.

Please also let us know if you found a better alternative.

I would but that is likely to come months down the road - I doubt this thread will be remembered by then! Still I'll figure out how to get that info out.

Update (can't edit the OP):

Edwin reached out to me but their team can't override their faulty algorithm apparently. Other banks/payment providers have no issue giving us 3-5x the limit Stripe slashed us to, but they can't. Root cause is the fact that Stripe fundamentally doesn't understand eCommerce / cyclical LOCs in their algorithms apparently as our business hasn't changed meaningfully regarding effective cash positions.

Fairly surprising Stripe doesn't understand how to evaluate financial positions correctly. Oh well.

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