I'd really love to get more insight into the Dec 30 -> Jan 3 time frame, since that's where everything meaningful happened... From the outside it's hard to tell WHY the lower level employees are completely incapable of driving a resolution, whether they're underpaid and apathetic, or if management has crippled them from making any decisions on their own. It's amazing that they don't have better processes in place after seeing HN escalation posts for years on end.
Last time I had to fight a company's customer support over them owing money to me (admittedly a couple of orders of magnitude less than OP), it was a mix of "It's someone else's fault, call them" and "Computer says no". Customer support is friendly, cheerful, and are trained to at least act sad that customer is having trouble. Lots of "I'm sorry that you are having trouble but I can't..."
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..."
Remember that most companies don't really trust their support employees to behave honestly. There are often thousands of them, and the turnover is high, and the opportunity for an employee to credit $1000 to their mates account and then not show up to work again is rather high.
I think that's why support employees aren't given very many controls to override the way the system works...
Sure, but these are low-paid jobs with no agency. Of course turnover is high. If customer service were a priority companies could figure out how to build a trustworthy workforce.
> If customer service were a priority companies could figure out how to build a trustworthy workforce.
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.
The cost of fraud far exceeds the cost of losing one customer. The cost of losing dozens of customers costs more than prioritising someone’s issue.
I have no insider knowledge of Stripe but I find it entirely plausible that Stripe will forever have cases like this. Serious fraud could cost Stripe hundreds of thousands, potentially even millions, and so there will always be cases that are out of the ordinary and don’t fit into the already defined processes. If you’re a low level employee, you do not want to take decisive action that costs Stripe a million dollars.
Stripe grows, fraud grows. Fraud is a cat and mouse game: the question should be, is Stripe effectively solving previously encountered problems? Given how much Stripe has grown, and how relatively consistent the number of complaints are, I’d say Stripe is doing a very good job.
I am sure Stripe could do a better job at handling these cases that fall through the cracks, but that’s a separate issue, because it ultimately comes down to having someone to take accountability and ownership of the risk. A month turnaround on this is totally reasonable.
> A month turnaround on this is totally reasonable.
But it was only resolved because of a post on HN. I would agree with you if Stripe actually had a way to escalate and resolve issues without making public posts on social media. Without HN's help, this issue would not have been fixed.
I get that stripe doesn't trust whatever subcontractor they use to answer the phones. But that person should be able to say "Yeah, shits fucked, I'll escalate the ticket to someone who can actually help".
Yeah I agree. There wasn't much more information for me to provide there that would be helpful. I pretty much had the same conversation the whole time. I explained the issue. They reached out (supposedly) to the review team who just told them it's under review. They asked me to upload the same invoices again. Then said they'll let me know. It just seemed like no one in that chain was able to actually do anything.
I can't see Stripe giving front line employees the ability to resolve Risk Management issues.
From the Risk Management employee's perspective, nobody gets in trouble for saying "no". Saying "no", or outright rejecting an account is the safe move for job security. And so, support tickets into these departments languish for absurd amount of times (months) at many companies.
My guess is that they're measured in replies per hour instead of in resolutions per month.
From my past experiences, it's clear they don't even bother to understand what I wrote. Reading comprehension is zero, which seems to indicate a strong disincentive to actually comprehending and helping.
