
One year in #stripe - beNjiox
https://mattarkin.com/1-year-in-stripe/
======
h8trswana8
Stripe may have a billion dollar valuation, but their support process is still
very immature.

You have two choices: 1) go to IRC, where they _only_ answer technical
integration questions, or 2) firing an email into the black hole that is
support@stripe.com, and crossing your fingers that someone will respond within
2-5 days.

We've been burned several times by how slow they are to fix payment problems.
You send an email to support@stripe.com, and then the waiting begins.

For a service that is critical to the day-to-day functioning of a small
business, their support process is unacceptable. When a critical payment issue
arises, there is _no_ phone number to call and _no_ ticket escalation process
to let you know that your issue is being worked on. We finally moved off
Stripe because their support process added too much risk to our business.

I know Stripe gets a lot of love from this community. But these SV businesses
need to learn that customer experience goes deeper than having a flashy UI and
easy-to-read integration docs.

~~~
michaelschade
(I work at Stripe.) Yeah, you're right: we've had some scaling troubles with
support in the past. The root cause is basically what Matt's post points
toward: our userbase exploded. Our investment in support didn't even come
close to keeping up. Long-term, it's critical that our support is not just
adequate but excellent, and as a result fixing it has been one of our top
priorities.

Our support is actually quite fast these days; we completely answer most
questions in under 3 hours now. We just launched our chat beta for account
questions this week, so you can ask urgent questions without figuring out IRC
or hopping over to email, and we're experimenting with things like phone
support and help right inside your dashboard.

We're going to keep working on this. Feel free to email me at
michael@stripe.com if you've any follow up questions.

~~~
matthewarkin
I can say that my last few tickets have been faster than normal, definitely
not 3 hours though. And currently I have an issue open since Friday

~~~
michaelschade
Hm, the case I saw looks like it's been totally solved, but feel free to
forward it to me directly -- would like to check into it. (And thanks for all
your help on IRC!)

------
nathancahill
> 430 hours writing messages or about 11 work weeks. (Hey Stripe guys, where
> can I send an invoice?)

But really, someone at Stripe should cut him a check. I've always thought
markin was part of the Stripe team. The IRC room is pretty much the closest
thing to support that Stripe has (still no public phone number, ticket
system?), and he's the lifeblood of it.

~~~
bluedino
IRC has unsung heroes in every room. Regulars in #ubuntu will each have
answered thousands of questions over just a few months.

~~~
nathancahill
Apples to oranges. Ubuntu is an open source project, Stripe is a billion
dollar company.

------
Cieplak
I'm skeptical of the data backing the language popularity chart because there
is no mention of Python. It seems unlikely that Python devs never come into
the IRC support channel. Ranked by general usage rather than by number of
support requests, I might guess that Python would be ranked similarly to Ruby.

~~~
matthewarkin
Yeah, to my recollection I can't recall a single person joining the irc room
with a python code base, I can't really say why or why not, but it should be
noted that it is popularity in terms of support, not in terms of api requests.

The naive interpretation would be that people using stripe with a python
codebase in general need less technical support with the integration.

~~~
metafunctor
We have a Python codebase, it just wasn't relevant to the couple of questions
I've asked on #stripe, so didn't even mention it.

The Stripe Python library + Stripe's API docs are pretty good, and never
really had any issues on that level.

------
fillskills
Matt, you helped me a few days ago. Thought you were part of Stripe support.
So glad that our questions match your favorite type of queries and that you
were there when we were in a crunch.

