
Sorry, upgrading your Dropbox Business plan will take 11 months - raphaelj
https://twitter.com/pendersj/status/1067822027350786048
======
preinheimer
Remember: Companies that have great responses on social media don't have great
support, just attentive marketing.

For every case that has a great resolution after coverage on
twitter/facebook/hacker news/local news station there's a hundred that
languished unsolved and customer screwed.

~~~
unsignedint
I think nowadays, social media support and traditional support system are well
integrated into their CRM.

I complain about things on twitter once in a while, if the company has social
media presence (e.g. Comcast, for example) I find it tend to be quicker and
straightforward to resolve issues.

With other options (phone and chat) it tend to be little more hassle to jump
through the hoops to actually get the conversation going of someone.

~~~
ocdtrekkie
Comcast's Twitter support is excellent specifically because it is wholly
separate from their phone/chat offerings. Phone/chat support is managed by the
various regional Comcast offices, Twitter support is the social media team at
HQ. If you want to get something with Comcast handled without being scammed in
the process, you use Twitter.

~~~
masonic

      Phone/chat support is managed by the various regional Comcast offices
    

Out of dozens of calls to Comcast support form California over the years, I
have yet to reach anywhere but the Philippines.

------
dylan604
That's ridiculous that Dropbox has never thought that someone might need an
upgrade to their account before their next "open-enrollment" style system.
Just off the cuff thinking would suggest applying whatever money has already
been paid for the existing account, prorating it for what has been already
used, and then subtract that from the fee to be collected for the upgrade.
Then flip the switch in the database. Sure, it might be out-of-bounds for
normal workflow.

To the credit of which ever Dropbox person responded, it sounds like they
might have realized how dumb it would be not to take a longer look at the
situation. Shows that most corps' pay less attention to the actual support
requests coming in than how worried that negative PR would be for having bad
support in the first place. Seems like the cart is leading the horse

~~~
ProAm
> To the credit of which ever Dropbox person responded

Glad to see it takes screaming in the streets to get reasonable customer
service for a paid product

~~~
lozaning
There was once a bug in the MLB TV password reset and login system. I tried
for days to get them to fix the issue for me and everyone else by giving them
an amazingly detailed bug report. It was like emailing a brick wall to get
them to fix anything.

I wound up opening a new support request that listed my username, password in
plain text, and a note that I cant login, please fix it. I knew they had a
policy that if you emailed support with password they'd autoreset it to one
and then email that to you.

So my issue got fixed, but you still prolly cant use 32 character password on
their site.

~~~
anoncoward111
Fun fact, MLB TV runs a ton of Oracle software.

Seems that their IT dept is really good at making repeated, pitiful decisions

------
raphaelj
We currently have a Dropbox Business account with 16 users.

We use their API to do some data pre-processing in the cloud on some of the
data when it is being pushed in the Dropbox.

A few days ago we reach the monthly 25.000 API calls limit, and contacted
support to upgrade our plan, as they tell us to do on their pricing page [1].
That is the response we got earlier today.

\---

[1] [https://www.dropbox.com/business/plans-
comparison](https://www.dropbox.com/business/plans-comparison)

~~~
gnulinux
Wait, I'm much more curious what are _you_ guys gonna do now? Sure, Dropbox
screwed up and they can't give you more than 25000 API calls per month this
year, because their system is poorly designed and not ready. But are _you_
capable of overcoming the issue that now you have no programmatic connection
to your cloud? I'm genuinely very curious.

~~~
coldcode
How can a public company not be ready to upgrade a customer?

~~~
bostik
Enough mindshare in the market, combined with the fact that they've already
had the liquidation event?

~~~
nl
I think you mean a liquidity event...

~~~
serf
the liquidation event comes _after_ the notoriety for bad customer service ;)

------
liquidise
A shocking number of companies hate money. I know this sounds absurd on its
face. But companies should make it as easy as possible for people to pay them.
Yet across industries many go out of their way to prevent it for various
reasons: security, business models, ease of fiscal reporting, etc.

A company's #1 job is, arguably, to stay in business. To that end, being able
to accept payments is something each should always be making better, not
preventing outright.

~~~
TomVDB
My daughter wanted a subscription to the New Yorker for her birthday.

There were some promotions on their website (not some shady magazine broker).
After going through all the motions, they happily tell you that you can expect
the first issue in your mailbox about 3 months later... 3 months.

How is that possible?

~~~
megaman8
there's a reason print media is going out of business.

to this day, I still can't pay for wall street journal article with a
micropayment. and no, i'm not going to pay them 100$s of dollars for a 6 month
subscription to read a single article.

~~~
TazeTSchnitzel
I've kept thinking that if I could just tip a paper a dollar or so when I read
something good, they'd make a lot of money out of me. But I can't.

~~~
usr1106
> could just tip a paper a dollar or so when I read something good, they'd
> make a lot of money out of me. But I can't.

The Guardian has it. But they are an exception.

On the other hand I tried to make a paper subscription of the Guardian [1].
Despite searching for an hour, I could find no way how to order the paper.
Maybe another case of rejecting the customer willing to pay, because nobody
could possibly want that service... Should have called them, but they weren't
open at the moment.

[1] for my daugther who wants to prepare for her English exam. Freshness of
the news is less an issue than having it it in a comfortable format for
studying. She hates that many of her school books are only online today.
Online could have some advantages, but most implementations by school book
publishers are rather poor.

~~~
zamadatix
I think that's more to do with paper delivery not having enough profit margin
and not so much them just making it difficult for you to give them money. They
do paper deliveries in the London area and global shipments of the
international weekly version but other than that they are all online like a
lot of news organizations have been lately. Both of these are easy to find and
subscribe to online.

------
lostgame
Ha. You know, all it takes sometimes is to make a fuss - noticed a reply from
DropBox already - can only imagine someone working there who saw this on the
front page of HN and was smart enough to make a very quick reaction.

It’s always the strangest when you’d like to give a company more money and
they go out of their way to make sure it doesn’t happen.

~~~
wolfgang42
DropBox support had already replied to this tweet 13 minutes before it was
even submitted to /new, much less reached the front page.

 _[edited for clarity]_

~~~
lostgame
That's even better news! Glad to hear they seem to be very on point with
support, then.

~~~
joshmn
No it's not. It's just great marketing. There are tons of users who aren't
privy enough to call attention to it on social media channels. If they're not
privy enough, they just don't.

My friend had all her luggage lost by Iceland Air a few summers ago. She spent
a week without it. She reached her destination and had just the clothes on her
back and her carry-on. She talked to everyone she could. "Have you yelled at
them on Twitter yet?" "No why would I do that?"

She did, and 12 hours later she had her luggage.

------
ldarby
This is symptomatic of hiring people to do tech support whose only ability is
to follow a script. Usually they can't even understand an if statement in the
script. They lack the basic ability to think.

I work in tech support myself (L3) and am constantly shocked at the brain-
dead, useless and actively unhelpful things the lower level staff say to
customers.

------
quantumsequoia
I can't reccomend Box enough for businesses. It's an enterprise facing
alternative to Dropbox. It has a lot more features companies will find useful

Dropbox is first and foremost a consumer company

------
StavrosK
Is Dropbox significantly better than Nextcloud at this point? I switched to
Nextcloud because I hated the Android app and it's been great so far. Why not
just switch to that?

~~~
beart
Advice like this is always funny to me. It's kind of like being upset about
the low quality of vegetables at the super market and being asked why you
don't just grow your own in your backyard.

I'm sure anyone who is technology savvy could switch to Nextcloud easily
enough, but that isn't the point. Dropbox was probably chosen because the
money is worth the convenience.

~~~
StavrosK
What convenience, though? You can pay for already-hosted Nextcloud and just
install and use it.

------
chmod775
Did anyone else notice how much better the mobile twitter version is even when
using it on a desktop?

Browsing it is so much faster and responsive.

~~~
londons_explore
Yes... But it still takes 7 seconds to load!

------
acjohnson55
My biggest Dropbox frustration is that it's impossible to simply buy more
space on a personal account. I suspect it's because most paying people don't
come close to using 1TB, but someone who buys 2TB is certainly going to use
more than 50% of it. Still, it's damn frustrating that it's not an option at
all.

~~~
jl6
They now have a 2TB plan. It costs twice as much. Ironically, this is exactly
what I asked for, but that was 3 years ago and since they couldn’t do it back
then, I made other arrangements, and now that it’s finally available I don’t
need it.

~~~
acjohnson55
Good to know! This didn't exist last I checked.

------
amelius
Unfortunately moving your data out of Dropbox also takes 11 months ...

