If anybody at Coinbase wants to reach out, I can probably automate 20-50% of your queries with integrations into your backend systems. Email is in my profile.
Also, don't underestimate an importance of a ticket update (any update). If you observe a few open cases on Reddit or Twitter, you will see that the worst thing you can do is say nothing - no ETA, not even an acknowledgement... it's the complete silence that makes people freak out and open multiple cases, spam multiple channels, only aggravating the problem.
1. Search docs for how to deal with lost 2FA device. Find entry about it.
2. Docs say, "contact support to blah blah blah" with a link to a realtime chat thing for support.
3. Ask question in chat thing.
4. Receive a link to a web page with a description of what to do from the chat bot
5. Follow those instructions, which involve logging in with a different browser (or incognito) and clicking "lost my device".
6. Verify identity, etc. etc. which finally gets the ball rolling on fixing the problem, which takes a couple of days, as I think it actually involves a human at this point, though I never actually talked to one.
It wasn't super painful, but it made me think, "What idiot came up with this? Why would I want to talk to chat bot only to have it take me to the web page that it should have directed me to in the first place when I was looking at the documentation?"
An alternative business model: An ML-based recommender for Coinbase's customers for how best to obtain satisfaction.
The revenue model would be a little harder to design, but you might help more deserving people.
Shoot me an email and I'll see if we can help.
That message has been pushed all through 2017.
AI is a long way from being at the forefront of customer support. At best AI works well as a complementary tool for customer support agents to help their customers, but not be the customer support agent itself.
What Coinbase needs to do is shore up their support team.
There's really no excuse for a 5 month old customer facing ticket with real notable amounts of money involved. I'd be sorely embarrassed, and it appears they are.
At the very least they need a sensible way to separate issues involving real money to be in a different priority bucket with actual escalation.
My time should now be deprioritized?
I ended up speaking with one of their board members.
Thousands are having the same issue (lack of support), based on Twitter alone.
Tweeting at the CEO is useless, unless you're someone famous.
The really sad part - with the amount of money they are making ($1B/yr), they should be able to handle support. It's only several categories (account verification, transfer delays, lost transactions) that can be easily parsed/routed, and even answered to, programmatically in 80% of cases.