If you want to know whether a famous Windows audio app works on Surface X (ARM), just ask them on Twitter because the web site sucks and mails aren't replied. If you have an issue with your groceries, just call them out on Twitter because in the store they don't care. For big tech, use HN. Fine.
These days? When was this not a standard practice for the financial industry?
Most of the time when a bank (or similar) decides to close your account they literally can’t even discuss the reasons with you without putting themselves in jeopardy.
Work for a hedge fund under both US and UK regulatory authority.
Where pleasant in this case is the person replying took the time to read the words you wrote and confirmed that by prefacing most sentences with "so I see you're trying to do xyz", followed by a thorough and well thought out response with references and suggestions.
So many times I've emailed other places (multi-million dollar companies) where it's painfully clear the person replying didn't read anything and some tool scanned my email for keywords which they auto-replied with even though the response makes no sense based on what I wrote. Then it takes additional days and back and forths to get to the point where they understand the original email that was written, in which case it gets "escalated" to another support team / tier within the organization where the process starts again.
No option to reach a human by phone, chat, email. It felt pretty awful.
Edit: I should clarify that I mean Amazon retail. I don't use AWS, but I imagine it has much better support.
Edit: I should clarify that I mean Amazon retail. I don't use AWS, but I imagine it has much better support.
Pivoting the angle on your perspective a bit:
"If a customer having a problem with our service isn't technical enough to backchannel us, they're not technical enough to be a viral thorn in our side."
To be clear, this is a process defect, and no company should aspire to build this into their processes as a feature. It's a net negative for absolutely everyone except perhaps you, me, and in the short term, the company. I'd argue it's a long term negative for you and me too as we hawk a service to others based on our current experiences, keeping the product from improving for everyone, including ourselves.
A good example of this is apple card support. You just text the support line. It's great because I don't need to wait on the phone. If someone doesn't have the info I need they can pass it on without me needing to know about it. I can continue my day without making a chore out of something. This is the part I was trying to highlight (not the reduced access to support).
> This is how support is handled these days.
... with an implied all other things are dropped/neglected and you replied with
> I personally don't see this as entirely a negative.
I fully agree with your point that companies being available on social media, but your first comment can be read as supporting that other avenues are dropped and that's clearly a negative. The grandparent clearly replied to that reading of your comment.
Obviously, it would be great if nothing ever went wrong. It would be better still if Stripe had a couple of thousand people manning the phones over Christmas. But automation can and does fail and I figure that by now anybody that decides to farm out a critical portion of their business to a large company is able to figure out for themselves that such a dependency has risks as well as benefits.
It still sucks for the OP, but your characterization, using a novelty account at that, is below the belt, especially on a one-sided story that appears to have plenty left out.
I think this event, and many others (and Stripe is very far from being the worse of the lot - looking at you Apple & Google) shows that these companies simply do not value their customers' peace of mind and are perfectly happy to send automated notices and perform automated takedowns without a (relevantly informed & powerful enough to act) human in the loop, and without the possibility of a meaningful appeal (that gives actual reasons and not "you have violated policies").
Automation can fail, but this begs the question of why this is automated in the first place, given the consequences. This is also not a business bringing in 100$ per month (though I will argue they also deserve respect, but I understand if they're not giving quite the same care as business bringing in hundreds of thousands or millions).
“Disgusting” is a hilariously strong word to use against someone trying to hold a 100B+ company to a little heat and get attention to their cause.
“Assume positive intent” is a facade for “don’t assume negative intent” - but that doesn’t mean we should dip into the good-will bucket for every company spokesperson here.
If you want to go after the CEOs of other 100B+ companies be my guest, they usually are jerks. But in this very specific case that is not so.
This is a disingenuous argument in general. If cars were much more unsafe than they are, would you also blame car crash victim for driving a car knowing what the risks are?
The pattern is as follows:
- A: I had a really bad accident, we should make these vehicles more secure. - B: No, you had to be aware that it was risky.
- A: Stripe jeopardized our business, they really should have better customer support for these cases. - B: No, you had to be aware it was risky to use them.
It's a non-sequitur: the plight for increased security/customer support is in no way hampered by the fact that the buyer had to be aware of the risk (which I guess he had, but ... so what?).
This is insanity.
It's scary to think a processor can't answer a phone call but hold your entire business' money in their hands.
This is where the Stripe CEO will reply to you when all their support processes have failed, and you have no other course to save your business. That’s the way all $122billion companies operate.
If he hasn’t been here yet, stay on hold he’ll be here soon.
Patrick? Catastrophic customer support fail call for you….
(Call waiting music….) Oh dear he’s on Christmas holidays. I’m pretty sure their automated processes suspended your account for good reason. If you feel this is not correct, email your case for why you should be allowed by us to have a working business to [email protected]