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.
>which somehow always seem to be experiencing unusually high call volumes...
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.
In practice, I think that what we're actually seeing is what happens when customer support is seen as a cost center. The company could spend more on support, or they can add a notice to the call waiting and call it a day.
I don't think it's that. It's just really hard to scale support. It doesn't matter if you shovel money at it, it's still hard. Companies that are growing very quickly will always have periods of less-than-ideal customer support.
I don't think thats true. I work at a startup that's recently raised our series B, and I use our customer service all the time. I always get excellent response times, and I'm treated just like every other user of our product. Our CEO spends a ton of time ensuring that operations and customer happiness are priorities. If it's a focus of the company, it's definitely possible.
I'd love to hear more about your company and how they scaled support, if you have time, ping me john@heapanalytics.com. If there's something I can do early to make scaling support easier later, I want to know :)
What are you saying exactly? I'll take the CEO, and the company, that takes support seriously over the one that doesn't. Support does need "serious resources" because it has long-term benefits to the company that too many companies think are not important and don't give it enough priority.
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?
The parent said that he didn't believe it was true that support was difficult. I was saying that if it's something his CEO is dedicating lots of time and resources into, it may actually be difficult!
Obviously a CEO a who values support is important, as obviously support is important.
Good customer support is important for a good customer experience (CX). These unusually high call volumes (cough, IKEA) are getting quite frustrating and provide for a terrible CX.
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.
+1 for a similar experience. We switched over from Balanced, who always had excellent customer service, when they shut down. It took a month for them to fulfill our simple request so that we could complete the migration process, and this was only after our CTO whined loudly over IRC to get a response, despite me sending emails to their support every few days.
The last time Patrick posted his email[1] soliciting feedback, I emailed him but never got a response.
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.
Not sure if this is the case for you all or not, but several years ago I was consulting for a company who was having serious support issues similar to this where random customers swore they were sending support requests via email, yet the company wasn't receiving them. Because it was working properly for some and not others we didn't think it was an issue on the company side of things. In the end though it was overly strict spam filter setting was just junking emails randomly. I bring this up because there does seem to be a common trend occurring lately where people are saying they sent emails and you all are saying you didn't receive or are not seeing them.
A company that accepts support emails silently, without giving an immediate acknowledgement and a ticket number, isn't serious about support. If you're serious about support, you have a tracking system visible to the customer.
I suspect a large overlap between the words likely to be used in email to Stripe (support or CEO) and the words likely to be used in e.g. 419 scams. Bad Bayesian filter seeding could easily impact legitimate messages in that case.
Especially if you're forwarding from your company domain to a gmail, some will be stuck in the company domain email and not get forwarded (has happened to me many times).
Not to knock on you, but I'm starting to see this is a trend. I was on the hn irc channel, and numerous people complained about the same thing. That you're always very willing and ready to offer support here on HN by saying "Sure, just email me!" but when these folks do email you, they are ignored. I don't know if this is a clever PR strategy to contain and direct fallout to a private medium so it never sees light of day, or if it was a genuine mistake.
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.
I'm not trying to be negative, but the stripe channel is very active. Why aren't you assigning someone to give 100% attention to this concentrated collection of YOUR users?
Again, not to be negative, but a complaint about Stripe with 500 up votes and hitting the front page, after having full-time employees in the Stripe channel?
Something is not going well with the CX (Customer Experience) if we're seeing this many complaints in the comments section.
> I'm sure being a CEO is a busy job, so I understand.
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?..
Our overall support response times are actually substantially faster than, say, 3 months ago.
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.
For what it is worth, just my two-cents, but I think even having a customer-facing ticketing system (doesn't necessarily have to be public facing) would help quell some of the unrest. At least for myself, I don't mind a delay in support, but when a request is sent in and it seems to disappear into a black hole it can be frustrating. If there was a way to incorporate support into the dashboard so that users could open/edit/check status of tickets directly from there that would be a great step in my opinion.
This is a really good point. Having something where you can see that what you asked is at least in the system, and Nth in queue, helps a lot when dealing with the opacity of tech support.
This would require a meaningful and physical support presence, for certain. It would also enable users to really prove support times. These are costs and risks for Stripe respectively. I doubt they implement this.
Yes and no. Theoretically you could implement an online ticketing system and have one or two people going through the tickets with minimal support. Plus, they are already have the expense of having someone constantly monitoring IRC, Twitter, HN, and any other public forum so implementing a basic ticketing system within the dashboard should be minimal. As for proving support times I think that would actually benefit Stripe greatly. It is easy for me to send a support request to Stripe right now and get on HN in 5 minutes complaining I haven't received a response in hours or even days. Sadly, we live in a "now" society that when we don't get an answer in seconds we assume we are being ignored. I am not saying this is happening in every case, but IMO, proving support times can have a direct impact on reducing the negative PR around support such as posts like this one.
I get that this is super sensitive, but I really wish you were a bit more public about these things. Stribe is basically the best thing that happened to ordinary programmers since the internet - it is the missing (technical) part of making somehing people want and selling it online, in a way where you can provide almost all of the experience.
Unfortunately with the previous (and now this) it seemed like you guys had become paypal and thus dangerous to do business with.
As a someone looking for a payment processor, I now know that the only way we'd be lucky enough to receive support is if we wrote a Hacker News thread that made it to the front page.
It's weird to find out this way, as I was procrastinating on HN instead of researching.
This is the reason I like to use something like BananaTag[0] for all my emails. It helps provide me peace of mind, and transparency, even if the person on the other end has no intention of doing so.
Disappointed Dev Update after 24 Hours: "After speaking with Stripe I have decided to end our dealings. Unfortunately the issue could not be resolved. We are looking at alternate providers."
Despite this being a public forum of great scale, and a certain degree of PR involved etc. etc., I think its great that you took the time to respond yourself (or even saw the post in the first place). I was considering a few services for transitioning a home grown billing system (old and tired), and this helped me decide to go with Stripe.
This response alone is why I will always recommend Stripe. The support may need support of its own, but knowing that you can get management's attention fairly easily says a lot of great things about the company and the people working there in my book.
Yeah, except not every Stripe customer knows that the real place to get support is (apparently) Hacker News, rather than Stripe support. The fact that the official channels are non responsive but a post on HN gets an immediate response could be construed as a red flag: the company cares more about avoiding bad PR than about having good customer service.
Well, the "support" here is just much more visible than everything else that we do. We provide support over as many channels as possible: we employ full-time folks in #stripe on IRC, we monitor Twitter, we send thousands of emails every day, we're rolling out phone support, we chat with customers on IM -- and, yes, we reply on HN. Obviously nobody should have to post here, but we'll certainly respond if they do.
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.
No knock on the great work you guys have done to make Stripe easy to use and visible but I'm pretty sure thousands of people try to defraud you every day because you're a platform to transfer money. Money is a popular thing to steal.
Complaining on social media shouldn't be required to get management's attention. This is damage control, not that there's anything wrong with that...
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.
OP (disappointeddev), if you could drop me an email, that'd be great: patrick@stripe.com.