Regretsy Issue Resolution
thepaypalblog.com
thepaypalblog.com
All they had to say was,
"Our representative was enforcing our policy, but unfortunately did so in a way that we didn't intend, and without the respect and courtesy we expect. It can be easy for someone who spends their day dealing with scammers to see wrongdoing where there is none, and we're sorry that happened here. Regardless, scammer or not, we expect all of our representatives to deal with customers courteously and professionally, and will redouble our efforts to ensure that happens in the future. We sincerely apologize to regretsy and offer our commitment to improve. We would like to assure both regretsy and the community at large that customers remain our priority, and we will do everything in our power to earn your patronage."
That's it. An honest, humble, apology, and you wouldn't have people running around the Internet saying Paypal are a bunch of childish crooks.
Agree with your sentiment but if they had said what you suggested, it probably wouldn't have been honest.
That said, this does not read as a preliminary post. It's titled, "Regretsy Issue Resolution". It makes no promises of further updates, and just says that they're dealing with the issue privately. That's their right, but I think it's a PR mistake. There are two issues in this case: 1) regretsy being treated as a scammer, and 2) the behavior and tone of the paypal representative. This post addressed 1 but not 2, and it doesn't look like there will be a second. This is a missed opportunity on paypal's part to turn the incident into a PR win.
i couldn't come up with those guidelines on a paypal search. so, it seems pretty horrible to me. It's fine to have rules, it's horrible to have secret rules you don't tell people about. They don't ask for documentation of non-profit status, or any of that. Just, here's a button! good luck!
That doesn't appear to be true. This post lays out the actual content of the relative PayPal policies:
http://thegreengeeks.wordpress.com/2011/12/06/why-paypal-is-...
and assuming the screenshots are not doctored, those policies do not seem to be particularly clear, nor do they say that documentation is required other than for officially registered non-profits.
2 - Go viral
3 - ???
4 - Profit
Jokes apart, this seems to be the only to get attention from a company. I wonder if there is a startup opportunity here.
Perhaps a consumerized PR firm that takes contract copy editors, submission bots, and some sentiment analysis to gauge the response of a NYT writer to a potential story (two lawyers suing each other far less emotional appeal than kids' xmas gifts getting shut down), and voila. Insta-noise-machine.
http://digitallife.today.msnbc.msn.com/_news/2011/12/06/9252...
PayPal's business model seems to be based off of Kafka's novel The Trial.
Seems like it's any industry which (i) has high startup costs so is dominated by big players and (ii) can cost you enough money in a single incident that you'd get seriously upset.
Not according to http://www.regretsy.com/2011/12/05/cats-1-kids-0. Specifically:
> At this point, I asked to speak to a supervisor and was told that “No one above me will talk to you. No one at my level ever makes phone calls. We’re only doing this to help you.”
Being sorry it happened and working towards preventing it from happening in the future are two very separate things, and PayPal is only saying the first. Can someone take these guys out already (Stripe?)
Did PayPal respond to this as customer support, or was it just damage control?
Last night we became aware of an issue
I guess this is going to be the future of getting PayPal to do the right thing - you have to make it to the top of a social network somehow to embarrass them.
PayPal has promoted tipjars for over a decade now, this was just stupid.
They should stop worrying about the 'important people' and just simply 'do the right thing'. Start with retraining the customer service people to not be belligerent jerks. Next if you're going to stand behind some regulation to monitor accounts, staff it appropriately so innocent people don't get randomly locked out of access to their own money for 6 months.
I'm probably too old to understand this. How does that solve anything?
I believe Jon Stewart can help with that.
1) Acknowledge a problem in a timely manner (assuming the really did only get escalation one day ago) 2) Provide specific information on what is being done to fix the problem (working w/account holder, making a donation as a mea culpa) 3) Explain limitations on resolution (legitimate constraints on public comment for privacy-protected matter)
What wasn't done well was:
a) letting it get this far to begin with b) failing to explain how future problems will be prevented by policy changes
I wonder how many other folks have had the same problems with Paypal's inconsistent application of their policy (when not just outright obstruction), who don't have the same resources to make noise as the woman running Regresty. And whether they will get similar resolution.
I read the Regretsy story yesterday, didn't think much of it - typical Paypal customer service, I've read those stories 1000 times. Now that I know it got someone's attention at Paypal that is "important" and could have done "right" in one way or another but they blew it.
At very least they could have refunded them their transactions fees! Paypal now looks worse in my mind than if they would have said nothing.
Unless you're someone who's using PayPal to collect money, there's remarkably little reason for them to care if you're logging into an account to pay by credit card, or paying 'anonymously' by credit card without logging in.
If you want any change from PayPal then you need to persuade people to stop accepting money through it, since that's the only way you impact their ability to collect fees.
if the only way to get good customer service is to get millions of people to support you, then you aren't doing it right
It seems to me that both Regretsy and PayPal are at fault. Regretsy for using a button with implications they didn't realise. Paypal for not making these issues clear and what looks like some shocking customer support. I hope PayPal look into the customer support issue but that aside the issue is resolved. PayPal have publically admitted fault and are taking steps to correct it. Good on them.
PayPal gets a lot of bad press. I do feel though if you look at the quantity of transactions they deal with and the amount of rules and regulations they have to work with they are doing an alright job. The could improve in areas but lets face it.. what big company couldn't.
I think that's a little bit of a stretch, along the lines of "Facebook users complaining of privacy violations are at fault for using a service whose implications they didn't realize" - I mean it's true, in both cases, but assigning equal levels of fault is a little bit much.
A big problem here is people acting with good intentions and believing that somehow that should be a shield to the world. Unfortunately, even the best intentions can't shield you from having to comply with business, taxation, and financial regulations. Make no mistake, regretsy was in the wrong here. Paypal was in the wrong here too, but mostly because they were rude and unhelpful in enforcing a legitimate policy enacting legal and regulatory requirements.
Ha, some of the anger I've seen from our users would make you think we're stealing millions of $ from them when they have an issue.
Also, re: minecraft it hasn't gotten much press but some people have had problems actually getting the game after they've paid, and in most examples the customer service they've gotten has been atrocious to non-existent. This doesn't just prevent people from logging into forums, it prevents anyone from playing on any public server and makes it a lot harder to even install the game or get updates (basically forcing people to pirate the game). Not that I'm saying Mojang should be raked over the coals for that, but it's not such a dissimilar situation.
Paypal is different. I have had an account frozen (fortunately with very little money in it and no urgent need to accept more) for reasons which were plain stupid (something about someone another account holder at the same IP address I logged in under at least once did business with). I have a Paypal account I use to make payments only, and only when there is no other choice and I keep a $0 balance there.
So what makes Paypal different is the fact that I have had a bad experience with them so that I will not trust them with anything important (f. ex. money).
Paypal has had a number of these gaffes reach a high level of public interest in the last year. Whether the customer was "in the wrong" is not a material issue -- the consumer perception is more significant. If the customers feel cheated, they are going to draw attention to the issue.
Companies make a deliberate choice about how much they want to invest in customer relationships. Paypal has assigned a very low value, here, in the name of keeping customer service costs low. The results are specific instances of customer outrage which have an interesting network effect -- the irritation propagates quicker, and further, because of the increasing connectivity of the social graph.
The end-result is either Paypal reconsidering their customer investment, or a widening opportunity for another service capturing market share.
That said, clearly paypal needs to improve the way it handles customer service and probably introduce a better way of disputing holds on funds.
I wonder what those defending eBay in the earlier thread will think of this.