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501 points eeemmmooo | 1 comments | | HN request time: 0.214s | source

This is an update to my previous post https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34189717 . Stripe has resolved the issue and everything has been released. I told the contacts at Stripe that I would do a write up about what happened from my point of view to help them understand what happened to me. I figured it would be good to do that write up publicly to help both Stripe and potential Stripe customers understand what happened and how it was resolved.

Summary: Stripe put my accounts in review for a spike in sales on Cyber Monday. Throughout the month we received very little communication from Stripe and had many support chats and calls. Keep in mind that the whole time Stripe was still accepting payments on our behalf on all of these accounts. Each of the chats/calls asked us to upload the same invoices each time for review and gave us vague information that our accounts were being reviewed. Finally out of frustration I posted on HN about my issue. Thanks to @dang for getting a Stripe employee to respond and he was finally able to resolve the issue for me.

Overall this review process was pretty bad. Very little communication and nothing I could really do directly to move things along or get any real information. It took a random Stripe employee to get an email from @dang and post on HN in order to get this issue resolved. I’m lucky because I know about HN and know that Stripe employees frequent the site, but I don’t think HN wants to become the Stripe support forum.

Stripe you can do better. We all know that in order to scale you need to automate pieces of your infrastructure and communication. But, there is a balance between automation and manual review. When someone like me gets caught up in an automated system there needs to be better ways of letting support help that person.

See my comments below for actual details and dates.

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hn_throwaway_99 ◴[] No.34233456[source]
Lots of posts here along the lines of "it's not good when you need to resort to social media shaming to get customer support", but I'll take the contrarian view, or at least explain why this dynamic exists.

The past 20 years has seen an explosion in Internet services, but a fundamental (often unspoken) quality of these services is that they must keep individualized customer support costs very low in order to be profitable. I mean, just look at Google, which has billions of end users. You can argue that Google takes in a ton of money, but it's not hard to see that if every Google user just had a single support call requiring 30 minutes of a support rep's time a year, that Google's profitability would tank (never mind the difficulty in hiring that many reps in the first place).

So all these services invest a ton into automated support and systems to ensure the vast majority of users never need support from a real human. That usually works well, except when you get some of these edge cases, and, very importantly, these edge cases are usually the worst when the customer behavior, while totally legit, "looks" pretty similar to malicious usage.

So, in that case, I'm glad that these back-channel avenues still exist when someone gets stuck in the machine. I wish there were a better alternative, but I really am at a loss to think what that could be. The social media channel essentially acts as a filter, as only things that are real problems are likely to get upvotes or lots of visibility. A trade off for users being able to get tons of value for (relatively) very cheap prices is that the "tail end" of support requests is usually pretty nightmarish.

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1. prirun ◴[] No.34233682[source]
Except in this case, the user was actually talking to customer support, so was already taking up their time. It's one thing to have zero customer support, like Google; I can see that saving money (though it's a shitty practice IMO). But if there is a CS dept and you are talking to reps but they're not solving your problem, wouldn't it be better to actually solve the problem instead of repeatedly spending time not solving it?