I’m not a Stripe customer, but I’ve often ended calls with other companies’ human tech support thinking “wow, I wish I could talk to a human.” Not because they didn’t take my side, but because I might as well have been talking to a chatbot. Many companies’ tier 1 support can’t go off script, can’t offer creative solutions that are even slightly off the rails, can’t make exceptions, can’t apply human reason or good judgment, can’t update fields in their screens that are read-only… they are basically IVR systems that eat lunch. So I can emphasize with the feeling that customers are always interacting with an API.
Yeah, I'm also not a stripe customer, but it's not unusual for me to email a company, and get back a canned response to a tangentially related question I didn't ask. If I then reply and try to clarify what I meant, I get back exactly the same canned response.
I don't know whether it's a chatbot spitting out replies based on keyword matching, or whether it's a human with a "responses per hour" performance target which doesn't give them time to read the emails they're replying to, but either way it's very different from the "talking to a human" experience I'm used to from daily life.
(And it's not a case of a correct process coming to a result I don't enjoy, except in a very narrow sense. "I understand your request and the answer is no" would be an improvement over what I often get)
This happened to me with Tinder, when I begged them for 2 weeks before expiration to let me renew my grandfathered Platinum membership, since my card wasn't showing up. Their canned response kept saying the account will auto-renew, no matter how I worded "no it won't, because you don't seem to have my card on file, even though my card hasn't changed".
Then, when the account didn't auto-renew because they didn't have any card on file, their canned response switched to "create a new Platinum account" (with much worse benefits).
I requested that this be the same grandfathered type of Platinum account that I lost.
Their canned response was that I should create a new Platinum account.
I said okay, but I want the same benefits I lost.
Their canned response was that I should create a new Platinum account.
I created a new Platinum account. It had much worse benefits.
Approximately one week later, I was permanently banned from Tinder for violating community standards without explanation (after having been a nice member of the community for the past year on Platinum and continuing to be one).
