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.
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.
Probably lead time on printing. 1) It's a physical product, not a service, 2) it has a short shelf life, after which it dramatically drops in value, so 3) and every overprinted copy becomes hamster cage liner.
My guess is that they grant instant access to the paywalled articles on the site, though. If they don't, they're being stupid, trying to keep people from getting three months of minuscule bandwidth per subscription for free and also being unwilling to price it in at however much they value it.
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.
No they wouldn't. Subscriptions for journalism make sense for the same reason endowed chairs in academia make sense. Advertising is almost always a better model than micropayments for the simple reason that it's (a) more reliable and (b) has fewer support costs.
> 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.
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.
Or the flip side, how they treat paying customers. I cancelled my New Yorker account because I got tired of getting the sleazy “Second Notice” envelopes which look like a bill but are in fact just telling you that you can save a few percent by extending your subscription. I mean, I value paying for journalism but there are plenty of alternatives which don't have the ethics of a used car salesman.
that's exactly why I cancelled my print subscriptions to both car and driver and road and track. I can't stand those. Whoever is creating those, really needs to be fired.
Our local newspaper's publisher has a service where they have a website with the most interesting articles from all the local papers they publish. I wanted to check out if it's worth it for me to subscribe to this, so I was looking for how much this costs.. turns out the only way to get access to it is sign up to get a stack of waste paper in your snail-mail box every day. Guess I'll stick to reading the daily free samples.
As a non-business but paying user, I had the opposite experience. They spammed me with over 10 emails "warning" me that my Dropbox subscription was about to expire, oh and also casually hinted the business plan was "better", even though I don't use anywhere close to the 1TB. Which of course made me cancel/not renew.
As much as a hate to say this, but their tech is solid and isn't the problem. It seems to be figuring out what the value-add is for different groups, and how to market it effectively. Or maybe cloud storage is saturated and not that interesting. (The size of SSDs also doesn't help for individual accounts which is either 1TB or nothing.)
I made the mistake of sighing up for a trial of their business account, it wasn't a good fit.
I tried for _months_ to get them to stop emailing me. Different sales reps, various mailing lists, drip campaigns, I unsubscribed from them all but it kept coming. I eventually forwarded like 13 attempts at unsubscribing to their CEO with a plea to help and it stopped.
Every business bureaucracy should be evaluated under this metric. "Are we making it harder for people to pay us? Are we making it harder for people to pay us more money?"
And no, never make it harder for customers to pay you less or to stop paying you. It's short term thinking; a customer who has a painful experience when they want to stopping paying you is a customer who will think twice about paying you again.
Some more detailed examples for that list of reasons: "you can't give us more money before a sales representative had a chance to upsell you even further, sorry they are all unavailable right now", and of course the personalized variant: "... before the sales representative who called dibs on your business had a chance to upsell you even further" (in that case you might even get deliberately stalled because the transaction volume might be more valuable in the next reporting interval, or the one after. All metrics will be gamed). A properly incentivized sales org would sooner run the company to the ground than allow themselves to get bypassed for even a single transaction.
This. I have always said the #1 job of a for-profit company should be extracting money from the customers wallets, and it should be as frictionless as possible. But no - examples abound of companies that seem to hate money, as you say.
I have been trying to pay Netlify for about a year now. Their TIN still doesn't match their invoices and we a have been unable to pay. It's totally crazy to me.
You're not kidding. I recently booked a Disney trip for the family and ran into issues at every single stage. First, there was a problem with the airfare not displaying the proper pricing. Then I was told that I had to remove the airfare and book that separately as that was the only way I could continue online booking. When I went to pay, there was a problem with their payment system that took 24 hours to resolve (it was on their side, to be clear, not a bank issue on my side). Then I had to get someone to fix the itinerary within my account because it was all messed up. After that, there was some issue with my account and I got mysteriously locked out for no apparent reason (no, I did not enter the wrong password). And then just today, at 7 AM I became eligible to register for FastPass events now that I was inside the 60 day window for the trip. Logged on right at 7 AM and sure enough, FastPass registrations were the only thing not working on the site. Spoke to chat support and they confirmed it was site-wide and the same thing happened the previous day. They fixed it within an hour and I was finally able to register for the events, but literally every step along the way there was an issue. I expect way more from a $170B company, especially one which families give thousands of dollars to at a time. The fact that I literally couldn't give them money for a full 24 hours and had to spend about 4 hours on the phone over two days to figure out and resolve with them is absolutely mind-blowing.
Very fair point, but only from one perspective. Yeah I gave them my money, but they did have to pay at least 4 hours or salary+benefits for at least one person just talking to me on the phone. That doesn't include anyone else behind the scenes who was used to help rectify the issue from the technical side. Nor does it include the cost of however many other people also encounter these issues and have to spend inordinate amounts of time on the phone with their employees. That can easily add up.
Yah, just had this experience with amazon in Australia. They've decided that you can only buy things from Amazon oz, but they don't stock half the stuff. I bought an instant pot from amazon UK a year or so ago and wanted to get one for my daughter. Nope can't do that any more, sent Jeff an email, got some gobbledy gook about how the taxes have to be collected for Australia now so they can't do that overseas. Yet I used to buy from Amazon US and used an Alabama address, they seemed able to apply US state based taxes without any problem. Not only do they refuse to sell things to me but they it seems they lie about the reason. Bought it from somewhere else, Amazon is now my last choice if I can't get it anywhere else.
They've actually turned this decision around. In a few months (not sure why it's going to take so long) us Aussies will be able to buy from Amazon US again.
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.
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?"
Are they? It seems the whole thread is about them not handling things correctly on the support ticket. I'd much rather have the issue resolved than get a speedy reply on social media, which usually gets shunted into a private chat where they resume the bad support anyway.
acting once the kangaroo court has been invoked, and after pitchforks primed to push the company ever so slightly towards the flaming stake of public shame are drawn, is not impressive.
getting support right the first time should be news. consumerist style resolution is at best neutral, and at worst still disappointing.
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
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.
> 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.
My previous employer did something like this. If you currently had the $8/month plan for 12 months and chose to switch to the $20/month plan, you'd get it instantly but with (8/20) * your remaining time, e.g. 4.8 months if you had 12 months left. (This also worked the other way round for plan downgrades.) Then when it came time to renew you'd pay a new 12-month subscription fee for a full 12 months.
It's a very elegant and convenient system. Choose the wrong plan by mistake at time of payment? Want to try the premium plan? You can switch instantly without entering any payment details, and without the provider having an extra payment card fee to stomach.
> 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.
Seriously, I implemented this in a few minutes on my crappy little side project.
If you want to downgrade, it's "contact support" so we discuss any issues and sort out a refund or credit as appropriate - but if you want to upgrade and pay more, that should be the fattest, shiniest, most automatic button available and give a fair, prorated deal with no hassle, those are customers who have experience with your service, like it and want more of it. The kind you want to keep the most. It seems like the most basic business sense.
I can see why it's hard - they probably use a third party payment processor which does subscriptions, and those processors don't tend to allow you to change the amount or timing of a subscription once authorized.
To do this switch, they would need to bill the extra amount each month until the end of the existing subscription, and then start a new subscription for the full amount later.
Starting that subscription later would probably require the customer to come back to the site many months later to authorize the new amount.
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.
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.
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?
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.
If you don't have hangups about Microsoft you can also get Onedrive - 1 TB for ~$5/month, and they even throw in Office if you want it. Files On Demand also seems to work pretty well on Windows 10 boxes and is included, I think the Dropbox equivalent is only on the business plans.
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.
>Remember: Companies that have great responses on social media don't have great support, just attentive marketing.
On other side may be they just streamlined the operations and the social media is the [only] customer case support database. If you look at various bug/case/issue databases with issue voting, discussions, etc - they do start to look like social media. So there is some convergence here. And may be Twitter can pivot and add issues/case priority/severity, release fixed in and other fields :) Imagine Periscope allowing to observe developers fixing your issues...
>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.
sounds like my BugZilla, in principle if not in actual numbers :)
If you want to see the exact WRONG way to do this, check out Straight Talk Wireless. [1] Instead of posting an actual answer, their response throughout their forum is thousands of identical "check your direct message" replies. Someone's likely getting judged on response times, not quality of response.
I gave Straight Talk a try a few years ago. It was great, until it wasn't great, and I needed some help with my voicemail. I eventually gave up, and when I went back to a "major" carrier I took pleasure in trashing the Straight Talk sim card.
>Instead of posting an actual answer, their response throughout their forum is thousands of identical "check your direct message" replies. Someone's likely getting judged on response times, not quality of response.
reminded how back at Sun bunch of years ago we had "forum activity (number of posts)" as a performance review metric. They should have used the number of cobras instead - at least Sun would have made some money of the cobras skins and meat :)
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.
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.
I've seen quite a few support systems use metrics like social media followers to help prioritize support cases regardless of how you reach out. It can be pretty crazy the difference between getting a Level 1 support rep vs Level 3.
That's 50% of what I use my mostly abandoned Twitter account for. Doesn't work as great as I would like it to, though. Most marketing people at larger companies mastered the art of slick 'n' slimy vague communication.
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.
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.
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.
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[ 4.5 ms ] story [ 145 ms ] threadA 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.
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?
My guess is that they grant instant access to the paywalled articles on the site, though. If they don't, they're being stupid, trying to keep people from getting three months of minuscule bandwidth per subscription for free and also being unwilling to price it in at however much they value it.
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.
No they wouldn't. Subscriptions for journalism make sense for the same reason endowed chairs in academia make sense. Advertising is almost always a better model than micropayments for the simple reason that it's (a) more reliable and (b) has fewer support costs.
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.
As much as a hate to say this, but their tech is solid and isn't the problem. It seems to be figuring out what the value-add is for different groups, and how to market it effectively. Or maybe cloud storage is saturated and not that interesting. (The size of SSDs also doesn't help for individual accounts which is either 1TB or nothing.)
I tried for _months_ to get them to stop emailing me. Different sales reps, various mailing lists, drip campaigns, I unsubscribed from them all but it kept coming. I eventually forwarded like 13 attempts at unsubscribing to their CEO with a plea to help and it stopped.
Every business bureaucracy should be evaluated under this metric. "Are we making it harder for people to pay us? Are we making it harder for people to pay us more money?"
And no, never make it harder for customers to pay you less or to stop paying you. It's short term thinking; a customer who has a painful experience when they want to stopping paying you is a customer who will think twice about paying you again.
That's about it as the modern replacement for 'gnothi seauton' on the Delphi temple ...
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.
[edited for clarity]
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.
getting support right the first time should be news. consumerist style resolution is at best neutral, and at worst still disappointing.
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
Glad to see it takes screaming in the streets to get reasonable customer service for a paid product
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.
Seems that their IT dept is really good at making repeated, pitiful decisions
My previous employer did something like this. If you currently had the $8/month plan for 12 months and chose to switch to the $20/month plan, you'd get it instantly but with (8/20) * your remaining time, e.g. 4.8 months if you had 12 months left. (This also worked the other way round for plan downgrades.) Then when it came time to renew you'd pay a new 12-month subscription fee for a full 12 months.
It's a very elegant and convenient system. Choose the wrong plan by mistake at time of payment? Want to try the premium plan? You can switch instantly without entering any payment details, and without the provider having an extra payment card fee to stomach.
Seriously, I implemented this in a few minutes on my crappy little side project.
If you want to downgrade, it's "contact support" so we discuss any issues and sort out a refund or credit as appropriate - but if you want to upgrade and pay more, that should be the fattest, shiniest, most automatic button available and give a fair, prorated deal with no hassle, those are customers who have experience with your service, like it and want more of it. The kind you want to keep the most. It seems like the most basic business sense.
To do this switch, they would need to bill the extra amount each month until the end of the existing subscription, and then start a new subscription for the full amount later.
Starting that subscription later would probably require the customer to come back to the site many months later to authorize the new amount.
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
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.
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.
On other side may be they just streamlined the operations and the social media is the [only] customer case support database. If you look at various bug/case/issue databases with issue voting, discussions, etc - they do start to look like social media. So there is some convergence here. And may be Twitter can pivot and add issues/case priority/severity, release fixed in and other fields :) Imagine Periscope allowing to observe developers fixing your issues...
>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.
sounds like my BugZilla, in principle if not in actual numbers :)
I gave Straight Talk a try a few years ago. It was great, until it wasn't great, and I needed some help with my voicemail. I eventually gave up, and when I went back to a "major" carrier I took pleasure in trashing the Straight Talk sim card.
[1] https://www.straighttalkwirelessforum.com/search.php?keyword...
reminded how back at Sun bunch of years ago we had "forum activity (number of posts)" as a performance review metric. They should have used the number of cobras instead - at least Sun would have made some money of the cobras skins and meat :)
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.
Browsing it is so much faster and responsive.
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.
Dropbox is first and foremost a consumer company