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Comment by noonespecial | Hacker News Reader

This isn't special... Yet. What happened here can happen even in the most dysfunctional customer service paradigms. A promblem randomly and luckily escalated from the people who can't do anything about the problem to the people who (generally speaking) won't do anything about the problem. As a lucky break, the person/department who generally won't do anything, decided in their mercy to do something this one time. IMHO, what was said in the email is just marketing duck-speak, no matter how sincere it sounds until proven otherwise.

The true fix, the actuall turnaround, is when the ability to actually fix problems like this is systemically extended deep into the space previously occupied by the employees who couldn't fix them before.

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"IMHO, what was said in the email is just marketing duck-speak, no matter how sincere it sounds until proven otherwise."

I agree that this looks like a PR stunt, but it also shows some potential changes underfoot at Paypal.

Here's my read of the situation: Paypal has been known for being beauracratic ever since the eBay acquisition, when all the smart people left and the bozos and middle managers remained. You know the type of place and the type of people it attracts: it's the smooth-talking-but-not-that-bright individuals who do well, and any smart employees who perceive the real problems the company is in find themselves a part of an outcast fringe.

Don't tell us we have bad customer service issues; expressing that kind of negative attitude is not going to impress senior management, what with bonus season coming up. Stripe and Square are just dipshit startups that no real business will ever use. La-la-la I can't hear you.

It seems someone at eBay finally realised PayPal was going to be "disrupted" if it didn't get a leader with their shit together. This new guy seems competent, but steering a big lumbering ship like PayPal away from its death course takes serious political/organisation-hacking skills, no matter how big the icebergs loom.

PayPal's reputation is so deep in the dirt that nothing any one at the company says will bring it back above ground. If someone says "we are changing X" and the changes actually happen, then eventually, over the course of time, Paypal's goodwill may return.

You're really overstating how "deep in the dirt" PayPal's reputation is, though. Some developers complain very loudly about PayPal, but just about everyone else continues to use the service.

They remain an interesting choice for anyone starting up a business that takes money online -- I have a business that I've partially migrated to Stripe (and I'll finish that up soon), but for about 9 YEARS before Stripe came along, every year I'd evaluate the available options for accepting payments, and come back to PayPal each time.

They certainly have trust and customer service issues -- and I've never allowed more than a few thousand to accumulate in the account for that reason -- but I have to admit I've only had technical problems with maybe 2-3 payments over those 9 years, never had my account locked, and generally just benefited from the flexibility and good rates.

My impression is that overall, they still have a middling to good reputation. Especially if they can fix the glaring problems remaining, I don't think they'll have any trouble staying strong for a long time.

Uh, you consider them to be something of a necessity, but you try to keep as little money as possible in the account because you fear your account will be frozen. I'd not say that they have "a middling to good reputation" - I'd say if that's what someone who speaks of them well thinks, that's an appalling reputation!

"it's the smooth-talking-but-not-that-bright individuals who do well, and any smart employees who perceive the real problems the company is in find themselves a part of an outcast fringe."

Extremely well said and sadly often true.

Yeah at the wrong companies it does definitely. You can bullshit your way in/out of anything, especially in big companies. Just find another job if that happens; if you are really smart and competent, there will be no problem finding something which does fit. Don't stick with elbowing morons, ever.

^^ Well said, my friend. Well said.

Maybe I've just been suckered in by his smooth-talking ways, but there's an earnestness to this guy that I didn't expect.

> It's the smooth-talking-but-not-that-bright individuals who do well, and any people who perceive the real problems the find themselves a part of an outcast fringe.

Change a few words and it can also apply to a "scene."

>> This isn't special... Yet.

Respectfully disagree. CEOs of multi-billion dollar publicly traded companies do not routinely reach out to disgruntled customers, no matter how public the PR disasters. Twitter has been very effectively leveraged in the past with various underperforming companies, however IIRC all of those cases were delegated to customer service / marketing personnel.

While you are correct that this intervention bore many of the hallmarks of a PR effort, the scope is unusual. While I am happy to be proven wrong, I would certainly be very surprised if anyone could dig up multiple examples of similar behavior on the part of a President/CEO or even any C-suite executive in a company of this size.

TL;DR: Personally looking after an account and handing out a cell phone number is not business as usual. There may be an element of PR, but it is quite proactive by most standards of measure.

This will prove to have been special only if it eventually proves to be normal, i.e. PayPal loses their reputation for opaque holds.

CEOs, like anyone, can lose interest in anything, due to lack of commitment or competing priorities. And no CEO lasts forever; the next CEO might not care as much as PayPal in the large currently doesn't care.

And an incoming CEO is not superman, it takes cooperation from below.

Good luck, hope it works out for them.

I disagree.

I had the honor of actually having a direct email exchange with Steve Jobs in the context of difficulties doing business with Apple. In a last ditch effort to solve the issues I decided to email Steve. I had never done that before. While I was convinced that it was pointless, I did it anyway. It was three in the morning here in California. I was programming and shot off a two line email not saying much more that I needed help resolving a business issue with Apple.

Fifteen minutes later I get this:

  What's the problem?

  -Steve

I must have stared at that email for an hour. Not sure if it was a hoax or the real deal. I wasn't even sure that I had the right email address.

I replied anyway.

The next day I got a phone call from a high-level VP who had been asked by Steve to personally look into the issues. This led to many meetings and even a couple of trips up to Cupertino to meet them all and discuss further. The problem was addressed to everyone's satisfaction.

Having the CEO of a large company take the time to take personal ownership of an issue is special.

No, not a PR stunt. As a new CEO in an organization, it is difficult to get access to the kind of data and examples you need in order to create change throughout the organization. I've seen this first-hand advising new CEOs on their first 100-days as a consultant (before I started my startup). Good new CEOs will often try to find customer stories which capture the specific problems they're trying to fix, and use those stories to champion change. Frankly, this is pretty similar to a tactic used by politicians to illustrate their policy proposals with individual human stories. Marcus needs those stories now to create change in the company.

My hat goes off to Marcus, and I'm a bit surprised at the pessimism from HN. Tilt at windmills much?

Not tilting at windmills so much as a 'fool me once' wariness. But you're right, good leaders seek out customer stories in their own words and try to start conversations with those customers so they can hear the good and bad from the source. Otherwise it's all filtered by people trying to cover their butts.

It is special that the CEO responded AND put his reputation on the line by saying he was going to fix this.

If he doesn't fix the problem, in a few months he's going to be inundated with blog posts saying "David Marcus promised this would be fixed and it isn't".

So he's set himself a very public (and difficult) challenge, and I respect that.

To be fair, the CEO didn't publicize his response -- the customer did. But the cat's out of the bag as a result.

The thing is, this "fix" only came about outside of their entire customer service mechanism (AFAICT). How many more disenfranchised customers are going to get "a direct line" to @davidmarcus? My guess is "none."

This is a pure PR maneuver. The proof is in the pudding.

Even the email says that this is only the first step.

Which leaves us only to assume there will be a second step.

I am always wiery of these maneuvers because they can swing both ways. I must say, good for the CEO to response; smart man who realizes the company is going to get hit, hard, and soon.

The only question left is: to trust or not to trust?

Let's see if PP makes any official announcements on policy to combat this.

> The only question left is: to trust or not to trust?

RTFE. This entire thread is basically regurgitating what was already said in the email. It already says they hope to win back trust, but with action, not words. To trust or not to trust?

Email makes that very clear: wait and see what they do.

The idea is that Paypal will use this to event to understand how their systematic mistakes, and to fix them. That way, others won't need a direct line to the CEO.

Of course, they should have developed mechanisms to take customer feedback seriously before.

And they should have fixed this long ago.

But there's nothing wrong with learning from your mistakes so as not to repeat them.

Nobody's saying that "learning from your mistakes" is wrong. How do any of us know what "the idea" of this is, whether we'll hear anything more at all after this one person is taken care of? The funniest thing is that for all of the years that PP "should have fixed this long ago," this one event is what is to be used to understand their problems? What happened to all the other years? What happened to paypalsucks.com? There's are extensive lists, continually updated, of incidents like the one in this story.

The only leeway I give them is openness to the future, but from the past to the present, they are a seriously bad company for entrepreneurs. A business owner literally cannot know whether they'll be caught up in PayPal's various harmful practices, and this message from an executive is the smallest Dixie cup of water given to a one of a hospital full of burn victims.

"Truly I tell you, whatever you did not do for one of the least of these, you did not do for me."

Not necessarily. Between writing that email & it being publish that CEO is now very much committed to this since its his reputation on the line now. He said he'll get it done.

Unfortunately there aren't a whole lot of details in the mail that one can call the CEO out for if it doesn't happen but its a good start and in my opinion more than a PR stunt.

That isn't necessarily true. He recently responded to another currently popular Paypal thread here on HN: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4485627

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