The service your provide is excellent, I adore the way Stripe does things in general, but your tech support absolutely positively blows.
We've been using Stripe for year and a half now and we had to contact support several times (6-7 ?). Every single time I would hear NOTHING back for few days, then I will log onto your IRC channel and start, basically, bitching. Lo and behold, not a minute later I get a private IRC message asking for an account ID and then I get a reply from the support in another 5 minutes. Invariably, it will start with a cry story how the support is unusually overloaded now.
This is absolutely unacceptable. In one case we had issues with two-factor authentication not working, and you'd think it warrants a more-or-less timely response, but, no, it still required the IRC trick to wrestle a reply from your support.
>which somehow always seem to be experiencing unusually high call volumes...
That's because the times you call, by the laws of probability, are exactly the times when it is most likely to be busy. The same principle leads patients to estimate the business of a doctor's waiting room higher than the doctor or staff would.
There's a name for this type of phenomenon in the abstract, but it eludes me.
In practice, I think that what we're actually seeing is what happens when customer support is seen as a cost center. The company could spend more on support, or they can add a notice to the call waiting and call it a day.
I don't think it's that. It's just really hard to scale support. It doesn't matter if you shovel money at it, it's still hard. Companies that are growing very quickly will always have periods of less-than-ideal customer support.
I don't think thats true. I work at a startup that's recently raised our series B, and I use our customer service all the time. I always get excellent response times, and I'm treated just like every other user of our product. Our CEO spends a ton of time ensuring that operations and customer happiness are priorities. If it's a focus of the company, it's definitely possible.
I'd love to hear more about your company and how they scaled support, if you have time, ping me john@heapanalytics.com. If there's something I can do early to make scaling support easier later, I want to know :)
What are you saying exactly? I'll take the CEO, and the company, that takes support seriously over the one that doesn't. Support does need "serious resources" because it has long-term benefits to the company that too many companies think are not important and don't give it enough priority.
Good examples are John Legere (TMobile CEO). How often do you see the CEO of Verizon or ATT actually showing a human response to customers in public?
The parent said that he didn't believe it was true that support was difficult. I was saying that if it's something his CEO is dedicating lots of time and resources into, it may actually be difficult!
Obviously a CEO a who values support is important, as obviously support is important.
Good customer support is important for a good customer experience (CX). These unusually high call volumes (cough, IKEA) are getting quite frustrating and provide for a terrible CX.
Terrible CX is endemic in business. I don't understand why Stripe can't set the bar higher. They clearly have money to throw at this problem.
+1 for a similar experience. We switched over from Balanced, who always had excellent customer service, when they shut down. It took a month for them to fulfill our simple request so that we could complete the migration process, and this was only after our CTO whined loudly over IRC to get a response, despite me sending emails to their support every few days.
The service your provide is excellent, I adore the way Stripe does things in general, but your tech support absolutely positively blows.
We've been using Stripe for year and a half now and we had to contact support several times (6-7 ?). Every single time I would hear NOTHING back for few days, then I will log onto your IRC channel and start, basically, bitching. Lo and behold, not a minute later I get a private IRC message asking for an account ID and then I get a reply from the support in another 5 minutes. Invariably, it will start with a cry story how the support is unusually overloaded now.
This is absolutely unacceptable. In one case we had issues with two-factor authentication not working, and you'd think it warrants a more-or-less timely response, but, no, it still required the IRC trick to wrestle a reply from your support.
Please fix this.