Hi Chris - CEO of Twilio here. I'm sorry for the issue. Fighting bad actors sucks, but we can do better to communicate with good faith builders like yourself. Mind sending me a note with your account at jeff@twilio.com, and I'll escalate for you.
A request from a random HNer – could you also commit to observing what the user's interactions with your customer service have been so far; and improving each of those, instead of nebulously "escalating" (where people will unblock an account because the CEO mandated it from up on high)?
Otherwise, you are contributing to a pattern where HN becomes de facto Tier 1 Customer Service, similar to how Twitter was a few years ago. This is already the case for various Google services [1], but I would hope that we don't want to normalize it for every service.
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[1] A familiar pattern to most of us – Ask HN: Google suspended my account without warning; Googler escalates internally; problem is solved
I'm going to have to cop to this. I was desperate and needed a way to get my phone calls up and running. I have many employees that rely on me to feed their families. We employ a lot of refugees with large families and if I don't run my business right, they can't feed their families. This isn't a game.
I posted to HackerNews because I suspected my issue would be seen and taken seriously if I did that. I could tell the ticketing system people were overlooked and only looking at my issue in a very shallow way.
If this had not worked, I would have started using my Stack-overflow account then Reddit. If that didn't work, I found an address of a lady how works for Twilio nearby, I was going to go knock on her door and see if she could put me in touch with someone.
Luckily I was able to get the problem resolved without those additional steps.
I would like to point out that Twilio's ticketing system works well for complex problems that are not time-sensitive. I had an issue a few months back that I think was probably quite complicated involving bureaucracy and multiple carriers and it was resolved in a few days via their ticketing system which was very cool.
I totally understand your point of view, and you are not at fault at all. Anyone with a small business who's faced with the faceless, understaffed customer service at modern web companies would have done the same thing. I hope your issue gets resolved quickly.
IMO now that Twilio is a public company, they should be investing in better customer service. I am simply encouraging them to solve the actual problem in addition to unblocking you; hence the "also commit to...", not "instead commit to..."
I hope my comment is not used as justification to not solve your problem. That would be the very last thing I want.
Oh no, I didn't take it that way. I just thought what you said was very interesting and wanted to provide more information and confirm that you were correct.
Thanks for taking the time to respond. The fact that you responded to this message at all resolves my initial concern, which had more to do with if I needed to change providers because of a cultural shift within your company. I understand that you are dealing with a very large and complex system that is changing quickly and will have problems, sometimes serious problems sometimes. Customer communication specifically is a very difficult and complex problem to solve at scale.
I actually spoke with one of the founders of Twilio when I first signed up. Evan maybe? He told me about how he studied cloud computing at MIT. This was a very long time ago.
Gregg was able to get the problem resolved within about 30 minutes once I reached out to him. He also provided me with a few solutions to prevent the problem in the future.
I understand the complicated problem that that led to this mistake and I think it is reasonable to make mistakes like this sometimes, especially if you're providers are threatening to suspend you.
The main problem that I would like you to solve is the lack of phone number. There needs to be a way for people to contact the company if there is an account administration emergency like this. Even chat would have been fine.
That being said, I did call sales and could not reach someone. If this is due to covid omicron and if normally I had called sales and would have been able to plead my case and gotten them to connect me with someone, I think that would have been fine and this truly is an edge case.
