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.
It's starting to seem like for too many companies, resolving public complaints has become a line item in the marketing budget.
Imagine having no real social media footprint or even a bad reputation with lots of downvoted posts. How are you supposed to resolve your issues when a company has decided no one would give a shit about you if you complained? You need someone to vouch for you and help you hold their feet to the fire, you need an individual who will tell your story to an audience that is too expensive to disappoint.
These have existed in newspapers for at least a half a century.
There's a nationally-syndicated travel expert who does nothing but travel customer service with plenty of name-and-shame.