Why do people come to HN for Stripe resolutions?

Stripe support is broken. I recall patio11 writing about how Stripe is all about putting in the correct "process".

Well, the process for support fails.

We handle a decent volume and have been a merchant for over 8 years. We can't even get an account manager to handle specific issues.

90% of requests are met with a subtle RTFM!

If you ask specific questions, these are avoided.

An open ticket is bounced from person to person. No two people seem to touch the same issue.

If you try specific chat support, and you ask technical questions, you'd expect some knowledge. Instead, most agents put you on hold and go over documentation, only to come back and say they've escalated this to a ticket.

Then the ticket comes back with more links to documentation, never answering the question.

The only way to make progress, answers and some human treatment is by jumping from connection to connection on Linkedin, trying to get an intro to someone inside.

Or of course, getting lucky with an HN post.

There's an episode near the end of The West Wing where it's C. J. Cregg's first day as Chief of Staff. Of course, this same day, a national security emergency has arisen involving weapons-grade plutonium. The whole day goes by, with C. J. increasingly frustrated as the Secretaries of Defense, State, and Energy all pass the buck on the crisis.

The President is able to nudge C. J. to put together a tiger team. With a few words, he has resolved the crisis.

Until I saw this, I never understood corporate structures. Why are reporting lines structured so customers can languish until the CEO barks an order to address? But during a normal day-to-day, the top executive needs stability. Anyone incentivized and empowered to single-handedly address problems is also-by definition-someone who wields immense political power. So departments are set up. The implicit standing order is "maintain stability." And whenever process actually needs to change, the top executive routes around the communication chains he has established.

Stripe is built around processes and programs, not people. Behind every investigation that results from HN is a team of people. I’m just one person on that team—many of my teammates are equipped to respond here as well (and, in fact, do so today). We care a lot about the HN community which is why we’re always on here—HN isn’t meant to be an official support forum.

It might look like the number of absolute support issues landing on HN is increasing, but proportionally, the rate remains steady. We survey users after support interactions, and the satisfaction rate has been at ~85% for the past three years. For that remaining 15%, though, we have a couple projects in flight that hopefully will bring that number down.

But as a meta point, I’m not leaving Stripe anytime soon.

hi this is josh from stripe, edwin is retired, it is year 2050 he is now an old man and types 5 words per minute.

i have updated the jira ticket of your issue to critical high priority because its growing internet points means probably pr disaster, thank u.

Posts on social media aren’t an indication that a company is ineffective via normal support channels. Rather, the customer is not satisfied, and feels broadcasting the issue is the best avenue of escalation. There is still a high percentage of cases closed satisfactorily you never hear about, or customers that never open a case because their needs are being fully met.

Stripe always had good ways of contacting them outside of the normal support channels.

I think it's be closed now, but Stripe used to offer support via Stripe, and it used to be actual engineers at Stripe who answered, instead of clueless customer support agents who after 3-4 back and forwards actually forwarded you to a proper engineer.

I remember many times companies I worked for tried to get help with various things and I always managed to get the problem figured out after 10-20 minutes by just using the IRC channel instead of writing the customer support. Felt like a super power.

heh, right now I have had an issue where in Stripe checkout. I paid for something for my spouse, and she decided to put her email in Stripe Checkout for the invoice. Now, EVERY purchase I make through Stripe Checkout with that credit card goes to my spouses email, and I have no way to fix this.

I would rather not have my credit card linked to any email, so I tried to fix this. To contact Strip support, I need a login (which I had for Liberapay), and I have been going back and forth with Stripe support for the past three weeks. But I find out really annoying that this occurs, and there seems to be no good way to fix it.

I say that to say, if typing in to HN for 5 minutes fixes the issue, that's a heck of a lot better than the past 3 weeks trying to fix this through the normal support chain.

I remembered a comment comparing this practice to religions where you can't/shouldn't appeal to God directly, but have to pray to a saint to intercede on your behalf.

Whether or not the theology works like that, the dynamic is basically: their actual support channels don't reliably provide relief, because their internal management has severe limitations and misaligned incentives that can only be overcome when someone with actual power says, "hey wtf guys, knock that out, this one's important".

On a search, it turns out that analogy comes up quite a bit:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23060642

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24778116

https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...

Don't overthink it: it's to save face.

What makes you say that the normal support channels are ineffectual? Of course no support channel is going to perfectly capture and resolve 100% of cases, right? So why shouldn't Edwin et al pay attention to these alternate channels to catch the cases that get missed? Plus, consider that it could be an effective way to find gaps in the traditional channels that can then be fixed.

By definition, you're only seeing the support requests that aren't handled through Stripe's ordinary channels. For every one you see here, there might be 100 or 1000 that are resolved just fine by Stripe.

Just ask yourself what are the lowest paying jobs in any company the size of Stripe? There is almost zero incentive for a customer support agent to go the extra mile in case of a more complex problem.

And I recommend on reading Delivering Happiness by Tony Hsieh or anything that was written about Zappos customer support department.

Let's not pick on Stripe, and let's not pick on HN.

Let's ask the general question: why do large Internet/tech/software companies tend to have lousy support?

The answer is that, somehow, good support is not a factor in the viability of these companies.

For the same reason that people come to HN and other social media channels like Twitter, FB and so on, for support with their problems with the big companies (Apple, Google, Facebook, Twitter...) that refuse to pay for proper support and moderation. They don't want to go into all the trouble of establishing proper support and dispute channels with real humans and they rely on the (cheaper) AI/ML solution. Real support is broken nowadays :-(

Think about what HN is. It’s a marketing campaign for a VC firm.

YC invested in Stripe. HN is a place where you can hurt the reputation of Stripe by posting about their support.

It's very common for customer support to be under-staffed at big companies, especially in the financial area--nothing at all unique about Stripe.

Just wait till you see the CloudFlare posts.

> An even bigger issue: What's going to happen when Edwin leaves Stripe or when HN loses favor in this circle?

Contact the CEO on twitter as this person did. https://lowendtalk.com/discussion/comment/3473621/#Comment_3...

Support for most companies is completely broken and ineffectual.

Everything is siloed so hard that problems are a “support issue” and not a product, UI, sales, legal, or engineering issue.

I’m not surprised that the lowest paid people at Stripe can’t help and people are forced to air their grievances here on HN.

Customer support doesn’t scale so it is minimized. Stripe is not unique in this regard.

One of the benefits of posting something on HN / twitter is the fact that remediation happens pretty quickly if it gets on the front-page or gets a bunch of likes and or retweets respectivly.

Because it works, and HNers don't flag those nearly enough.

Because in 2022 the only way to get a company to give a damn about a customer is by publicly shaming them.

I’ve had this idea for a browser extension: Trash. If you’re dissatisfied with a site you just click it and it tweets that they are #trash, and there’s a companion site that lets you look at who’s the most trash (normalized for user volume of available) so we can permanently export this transparency of customer dissatisfaction from internal dashboards to something more visible.

> why is normal support so ineffectual at surfacing.....

The question coming from a three months old account. Let me rephrase it, when was normal support ever effectual in any internet companies.

While it is not ideal, Let's be honest at least there is a way for you to put your case into the public, and they care enough to respond.

Most company just dont give a damn.

to warn others

try using the stripe discord. they do a decent job responding to and resolving issues.