Stripe CEO here. I just wanted to let everyone know that I'm taking a look at what happened here.
OP (disappointeddev), if you could drop me an email, that'd be great: patrick@stripe.com.
OP (disappointeddev), if you could drop me an email, that'd be great: patrick@stripe.com.
The service your provide is excellent, I adore the way Stripe does things in general, but your tech support absolutely positively blows.
We've been using Stripe for year and a half now and we had to contact support several times (6-7 ?). Every single time I would hear NOTHING back for few days, then I will log onto your IRC channel and start, basically, bitching. Lo and behold, not a minute later I get a private IRC message asking for an account ID and then I get a reply from the support in another 5 minutes. Invariably, it will start with a cry story how the support is unusually overloaded now.
This is absolutely unacceptable. In one case we had issues with two-factor authentication not working, and you'd think it warrants a more-or-less timely response, but, no, it still required the IRC trick to wrestle a reply from your support.
Please fix this.
That's because the times you call, by the laws of probability, are exactly the times when it is most likely to be busy. The same principle leads patients to estimate the business of a doctor's waiting room higher than the doctor or staff would.
There's a name for this type of phenomenon in the abstract, but it eludes me.
Good examples are John Legere (TMobile CEO). How often do you see the CEO of Verizon or ATT actually showing a human response to customers in public?
Obviously a CEO a who values support is important, as obviously support is important.
Terrible CX is endemic in business. I don't understand why Stripe can't set the bar higher. They clearly have money to throw at this problem.
I'm sure being a CEO is a busy job, so I understand. And I'm sure he'll respond to OP. But keep in mind just because he posts his email publicly doesn't mean he's actually any more reachable for it.
(Two of us from Stripe, myself included, have already been in contact with disappointeddev.)
I think and hope it was the latter, but the frequency with which this seems to be happening starts to suggest it may also be a little bit of the former. E.g., just in this very comment thread there's a handful of people claiming you never responded to emails even after explicitly asking them to email you.
Something is not going well with the CX (Customer Experience) if we're seeing this many complaints in the comments section.
Well to be fair, they pretty much have to go to a private medium to talk to their customers, especially in a financial setting.
Why would you understand?
It is a simple feat to respond. At the very least, he could have forwarded your email to someone, CC'd you on it, and said "Hey X, please look into this case for me."
No response to an email is above all disrespectful, regardless of how busy he might be. It also implies that he is giving away his email address as a PR move.
These pieces of information that keep dropping on HN is going to make me move my business away from Stripe too.
Stripe, why would you screw yourself so badly when you could easily have been the only viable option by simply not behaving like PayPal?..
That being said Patrick, you can't do this forever, the service & support ought to be well without the need of a call for attention.
I think this is the 3rd or fourth one in the past 2 weeks. Is something going on at Stripe? Why are these all happening now?
Part of it is, I think, because we're growing quickly -- even for the same problematic case percentage, there are going to be more in absolute number. (And, as Stripe becomes more prominent, the cases that happen will themselves get more attention.)
In addition, the cases that get public attention generally aren't clear-cut. For example, the other discussion on HN a few weeks ago was about a marijuana-related business that most likely violated our ToS.
We care a great deal about providing great support at scale. Each of these cases triggers a lot of internal discussion about how we might have been able to do things better.
Unfortunately with the previous (and now this) it seemed like you guys had become paypal and thus dangerous to do business with.
It's weird to find out this way, as I was procrastinating on HN instead of researching.
Fraud-related cases are particularly hard, by the way. Thousands of people try to defraud us every day. (I guess it's a consequence of being highly-visible and easy to set up.) And so the support for those cases has to be handled a little differently.
Maybe that's the problem. Might be better to provide stellar support on one or two channels.
Please note that I have nothing against Stripe, dealing with money looks very challenging, and these issues are probably not easy to solve/support for each and every user.