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.
Most companies' customer support seems to center around: 1. frustrate the customer with a long phone tree quest, hoping the customer goes away without figuring out and invoking the magic button sequence that takes them to a human, and 2. once the customer reaches a person, shower customer with empathy and politeness but do not solve their problem, hoping they just go away in frustration.
Customer support can generally only do "happy path" things that you can do on the web site yourself. Pay your bill? Sure thing. Read to you your account information? Of course. Fish your account out of purgatory because of a one in a million edge cases causing some sloppy code to divide by zero? No chance in hell. "I'm so sorry you are having that issue, let me please forward you to someone else..."
I think that's why support employees aren't given very many controls to override the way the system works...
This is 100% accurate, in my experience. You even gave the answer in your first sentence:
> these are low-paid jobs with no agency.
If they weren't low-paid jobs with no agency, a lot of trust and retention would follow, almost like magic. (Of course there would still be people who abuse or mess up the intended system; that's why you have internal business controls and vetting.)
A long time ago, I worked overnight customer support for a very large ISP, via an outsourcing company. On the overnight shift, there was no distinction between technical support and billing because call volumes were so much lower. Also because of being on the overnight shift, we had much greater authority to make account adjustments and fixes because the employees who worked directly for the ISP didn't want to be woken up in the middle of the night to approve requests. All we needed was a second coworker to sign off. Oh, and we got paid a 25% differential for the shift.
People would actively try to move onto the overnight shift. Our group inside the outsourcing company had the lowest turnover rate by far and was helped by one year our overnight shift had zero turnover. Two of my coworkers even declined being promoted to daytime lead so they could stay working overnights.
Yes, the pay was good even though the hours were not so great, but the autonomy was better. We were treated like adults; we didn't even have a technical support script because no one from the ISP had come to officially train us so we weren't "allowed" to use the script in the knowledge repository. We had access to the billing tools that would tell us why an account was in a certain state and so we could actually fix, or at least tell the customer about, problems instead of offering them a "trouble ticket" and a "one-time credit of $15 for your issue."
It was amazing and I'm often sad that our industry has forgotten that humans are the point of all of this.