It should not be necessary for someone to come to an online forum and complain to get the customer support issue resolved.

Stripe customer support organisation should actually resolve customer issues.

Tech companies go on and on and on and ON about "culture", but one thing I can tell you truly needs to be built into culture is customer support. For example, everyone knows Google's culture of customer support - it's "avoid all human contact, send all support queries to a machine".

I think tech companies are super bad at customer support because the founders have rarely worked front line in customer support so they don't know how to build an organisation around great customer support thus it is not part of the culture/company DNA.

Seriously, Hacker News should have a "tech support" link at the top where people can post tech support queries for companies who can't manage to respond to and keep their customers supported and happy.

Customer service rep turned engineer here. I think this true, but I also think that so many founders just don’t care about customer service. Investors are far more interested in new customer acquisition than retention, so naturally more resources are going toward customer acquisition.

Customer service is an afterthought cost center that barely pays and experiences high churn in 90% of the companies I’ve worked for in my career.

In my experience the Silicon Valley approach to it is to optimize your product for the 98% of customers who won't need anything more hands on from you, throw some automation (in the form of documentation, chat bots, and phone menus) at the remaining 2%, and don't worry too much about anyone who falls through the cracks past that.

Which can lead to a great experience most of the time unless you're one of those unlucky leftovers, in which case the ground falls out from beneath you into a labrynthine Kafkaesque hell proportional in brutality to the size of the company and the extent to which you depend on it.

I appreciated his honesty. It was a cost center designed to not achieve a favorable outcome for the customer.

Good investors (I.e, the ones who make investments that turn out to be successful) care a lot about retention, as it’s the strongest indicator that the product/service being offered has enduring value/appeal.

We also only are getting one side of story.

Not to knock on a gym - but I'd be interested in the membership plan rules - some of fitness memberships should be flat out illegal - auto renewal for a year, can't cancel to early, but have to cancel before end of membership (short cancellation windows) and big rigmarole.

AWS support is stellar. We have workloads on the three major cloud providers, and AWS support is better by an order of magnitude. If anything, this has spoiled us. When things that take minutes to solve (or figure out) on AWS takes days on another cloud provider, no amount of technical wizardry can make up for it. They won't be dragging your feet just because you have a lower level plan, but if you want to call them to solve stuff right now on the phone or have them showing up at your company with specialists in tow, then you have to fork over the required amount. It's well spent, IMHO.

I had one guy work the better part of the day with several phone calls to get to the bottom of my non-critical issue.

Not all experiences have been excellent (I think they could head off half my tickets if their status page would just be accurate), but Amazon is far from the "do humans actually work there" category.

you don't get to be the winner in a winner take all ecosystem being dragged down by individual requests. you do your best to reduce them to acceptable orders of magnitude, and those that do hit the mines get blown up.

that's the takeaways from all large scale/VC funded platforms. they just don't care, because it's not incentivized. when you have 1 million customers, 1000 casualties are a statistic. when you have 10, it's a different story.

Have you ever tried doing the same for a Google product? Guarantee their optimizing for operational efficiency and not customer happiness. At all.

to be fair i'm not sure what their retail help setup is.

we were a small fry spending wise so it's ok, but let's not kid ourselves, they aren't pro-customer after you're on the platform unless you're throwing around serious cash.

OTOH, every system has its limits and failures, and effective monitoring of communication outside official systems is one way that organizations can figure out what's not working about their system.

The real test is if they handle issues with one-off fixes and situation-specific exceptions, or if they figure out how their official channels failed and fix it.

Let's hope it gets the OPs problem resolved and Stripe uses this case as a learning experience so this doesn't happen again.

Bill Gates has said something like "Your most unhappy customers are your biggest learning opportunity."

Your point may be valid, if customer service dropped the ball. But we don't know that just from the info posted here so far.

So, I'd like to see Stripe feel enough heat that they decide that any time they suspend service for a customer, that customer is (1) immediately entitled to talk to a live person at Stripe with the authority to undo the suspension (probably probationary and with limits while being appealed and investigated) and (2) guaranteed a quick resolution process that involves access to real people with authority.

If Stripe's policies are that going with them means living with a Sword of Damocles forever hanging over your head, that should be well-advertised whenever they are discussed.

This is not customer service.

This is the unfortunate trend in the industry where the only way to get issues resolved is to take to social media and shame the company such that some powerful insider at the company (who happens to hang out on HN) takes action to sidestep the failed customer support processes and get the issue resolved.

Do you still feel like commending them for amazing customer service?

Worked out well, happy with the support.