If even a modicum of this attitude can seep down into all of the customer facing departments at PayPal, it'd be an awesome thing. I hope they pull it off.
Agreed. I hope the policy and attitude can change. I do a lot of business with PayPal because my customers prefer it. Certainly not because they have provided much value other than being the most commonly used service.
Actually it would be 'life saving'. One of the reasons the payments space is flourishing is because PayPal has been a poor service provider (creating pain). And it has to come from the top, and you have to look into success metrics carefully to insure the folks in your organization aren't doing more harm than good to get 'good' ones.
Step one for PayPal would be to always provide a reason when they take action, for all users. Every bad experience I have had with PayPal began with them doing something negative, and never explaining why they did it. I have had methods of payment locked out, I have had funds not released, I have been told I could not make an instant payment, and not once was I given a reason why.
I agree that they should always try to give you a reason. But that's not as easy as it sounds.
Put yourself in the position of somebody who is trying to commit massive fraud. E.g., by purporting to sell a bunch of stuff on-line. Every bit of information you have about how PayPal combats fraud is helpful. Every time PayPal gives somebody a reason, it helps fraudsters avoid that particular wall or trap, letting them probe the defenses elsewhere.
It's a hard problem. PayPal solved it the wrong way, but they'll never get to full transparency.
Security by obscurity is very, very effective in the short to medium term, especially you're paying attention to people hacking around it and are continuously evolving your defenses.
Also, they've intentionally chosen a domain where full security isn't possible, mostly due to circumstances outside their control. Remember, they captured a huge new market mainly through the sophistication of their anti-fraud systems. So security through obscurity has to remain a major tool for them.
Try asking your regular bank how their fraud detection works, or your insurance company, or the secret service.
Basically if you work in fraud detection (or broadly any kind of crime detection) you keep your techniques secret because otherwise you're helping the criminals avoid you.
Look at the source code for Reddit or Hacker News, notice how in the publicly released codebases they've both chosen specifically not to publish the code to do with vote-rigging detection.
Yes...once they figure it out, you still need to change your spam filtering/fraud detection methods. But if they have the algorithms, then they can figure out how to bypass it offline, on their own hardware, and you'll never now that it is happening until it is too late.
Security has nothing to do with fraud. And in combating fraud, obscurity works. SSL is security, but it's meaningless if the site you just sent your CC data to is fraudulent.
Then, you need to understand how open PayPal is to fraud. I can easily commit major crimes using PayPal, and security has nothing to do with it.
This is the challenge they face. If you think it's an easy problem to solve, ask yourself: why is there no one else out there doing this same thing? Why are all the other supposed opponents limited in such drastic ways that PayPal is not?
I'm not suggesting they are perfect, but your trite remark is meaningless and ignorant of the realities of the system.
Great email.. one of the most convincing and sincere high level apologies I've read. Perhaps, for once, the future is looking bright for Paypal. I could have done without the "forwarded from my iPad" at the bottom though.
I realize you are being cynical, but the e-mail says the CEO wants to make radical changes to fix issues for all customers. I'm a bit skeptical myself, but if we take him for his word this isn't just for a subset of users.
I think notatoad is being realistic. People with large audiences get things fixed, they get the resources, and the rest of use get ignored. No one will write an article about
notatoad or protomyth getting hosed.
I hope Paypal can get it together, but I live in fear of getting hosed by them without any recourse.
I'll admit that it's better than PayPal's previous customer service policy of "fuck all y'all", but I'm not changing my opinion of the company based on one email from a CEO in full damage control mode.
Requiring personal supervision from an executive to withdraw funds is a negative against PayPal, because the president isn't going to personally supervise every account).
It's good that this executive (President, not the CEO as indicated in the title) is taking initiative to fix things at PayPal. But until things are fixed, PayPal is still a business risk.
Requiring personal supervision from an executive to withdraw funds is a negative against PayPal, because the president isn't going to personally supervise every account).
True, but as you note in the second paragraph, this is still a major improvement. I stopped using Paypal a long time ago because of an utterly typical story: https://jseliger.wordpress.com/2011/12/09/december-2011-link... and have been encouraging other people not to use Paypal ever since.
It's almost impossible for Paypal to be worse than it is, and it might even get better.
Why now? Why this situation is it finally hitting home?
What confuses me is that David acts as if these are new stories of accounts frozen, staggered access to money, and blocked recourse to customer chargebacks. This has been happening for years with hundreds of publicly written stories of bad will by PayPal.
I've been reading similar complaints to that for years. Some of which were far worse in my view (i.e. taking money out of banks to repay people who weren't even seeking a refund because PayPal changed its mind about someone's product or service).
Why does PayPal suddenly care? Is it because there is viable competition now?
I think you're both underestimating how long it takes to really get settled in and take charge of a huge corporation, as well as overestimating just how long 5 months really is.
Seems like about the right amount of time for him to start really kicking things into high gear imo.
If I had to guess, I'd say because it took the ceo a few months to see how things are currently done and identify problems. The rest of the time I guess would be waiting for the right case to come along.
Five months may seem like a long time, but trying to fix something that's pretty broken probably requires a bit of time to understand just what the hell you're trying to fix.
Not for the CEO of a big company like that. 5 months is barely enough to get the lay of the land. The press may have you believe otherwise (e.g. Marissa Mayer is changing Yahoo overnight). It's a more interesting story than "she's slowly getting to know how things work while trying to fix the most obvious and visible disasters."
"I can run a 3 man startup and change things in a week! Why can't a public traded company worth billions with thousands of employees change things in a week?"
Check your ignorance and entitlement at the door, please.
Not to mention that any changes they make have to be proven not to expose them to the banking laws that they've been assiduously avoiding, and that would provide the kinds of protections that the general population expects.
They can't escape these laws on Australia as they are a financial depository institution regulated by APRA. Should they try to deny an Australuan their money like this, they will be in a world of pain.
Classic case of someone who just can't win whatever he does. People have been crying out for PayPal to change - he notices this, he emails the guy with a first class email but still gets criticised. Criticise him if he doesn't act, don't criticise the guy for being big enough to say 'hey, we have a problem, I want to fix it' - that should be applauded, even if it's come later than people would have liked - at least it has come.
Oh come on. He can't "win" by solving one person's problems. Will he give his personal email to everyone who has got his account frozen or large chunks of money taken away by PayPal? I doubt it.
This is a non-solution, which is almost worse than doing nothing at all, because it's active disingenuity.
We must see the first step. He is trying to stop the bleeding. My guess is that the signs are there that the bleeding has started, it just hasn't hit mainstream yet.
Did you read the same note I did? He says explicitly that he's new in the CEO spot and would like to use this story as a tool for redoing how they handle holds, and how they deal with customers.
You can't win by solving just one person's problems. But you also can't win unless you start by solving one person's problems. And then fix the system, so that the kind of problem is less likely to recur.
This, IMHO, is exactly the right way to do it. As contrasted with the wrong way, which is for employees to sit in their comfy offices and avoid all direct contact with customers, making up bureaucratic solutions to imagined problems.
Looks more like he is trying to buy direct outside expertise and opinion, without it being filtered through the company, in return for personally looking after this account. The problem from there on in is whether that person can actually continue to be useful as they will no longer be having the experience of a normal customer and might start being less critical in their approach. Picking someone who is absolutely furious probably helps in this as they are likely to be very upfront about their experiences.
I agree, that people should give him the chance to fix Paypal if he wants to try. There is always a starting point for change and if this it, he should be applauded and not ridiculed.
David Marcus was CEO of Zong, a small mobile payment startup who got bought by PayPal last year. When buying the company, the CEO of eBay Inc. asked him to change quiet a few things in the company culture. This email is one of the first step to improve customer service. Will he succeed I don't know, but you gotta give him the credit of trying.
It's fantastic to see PayPal finally paying attention to these kinds of nightmare stories, but it's hard to believe it has anything to do with altruism.
They are seeing Stripe, Square, etc getting way more mindshare, and they are scared.
With all due respect PayPal, good riddance. You've sucked too hard for too long, and now we finally have alternatives.
Here is what I would do... I would take him up on his offer (personal attention from the CEO? Sure!), but I would ask him whether he'd be willing to pick 3 or 4 other customers who had _NOT_ written an article which had gone viral and offer THEM the same deal.
I want this to be true. I want PayPal to believe that this behavior is harmful to their business and to push (at ALL levels of the company) to change how they treat their customers. But I won't give them the benefit of the doubt based on one message from the CEO. They burned their second chances long ago, and it's much harder to regain my trust after losing it. I hope that they do.
Ooh! Ooh! Pick me! Pick me! I had 20K removed from my account without an explanation and even hired a lawyer, all of which went absolutely nowhere.
This is all a bunch of baloney. If PayPal was really serious about fixing all the pain and misery they caused, they would create a direct line of communication where those on the other end were empowered to resolve all problems ... instead of giving a curt "send us a letter".
Until PayPal starts working with their customers and stops treating them like criminals, I'll take my business elsewhere.
How do you think a mechanism like that gets created?
Do it in one go and you're talking a department of tens or hundreds of people, most of them newly hired. Turn them loose without careful thought and at the very least you create massive chaos in your organization. But you also probably create substantial losses as fraudsters use the chaos to take a lot of money.
I think the only way you can get to the customer service experience you want is by starting with one customer's problems, solving them, and then changing the organization a bit so it's less dumb. Then you rinse and repeat for years.
It's an organization of thousands of people across the globe, with a zillion lines of code and, a ton of procedures and habits, and a lot of institutional inertia. The way to solve it is by starting now in a manageable way, and that's what he claims he's doing.
Perhaps one of the reasons PayPal is being more service conscious is they finally have competition encroaching on their territory like Stripe + Square.
I guess its never too late to stop sucking though.
> they finally have competition encroaching on their territory like Stripe + Square
And bitcoin. No matter how PayPal tries to put the kibosh on selling PayPal for bitcoin, people will still find a way around it.
I no longer use PayPal after their first and only abuse of my account. They had one chance and I found better solutions. That the CEO is sending out emails to high PR value customers is a very telling move.
Credit where it's due: out of all the hundreds of Paypal horror stories, this is the first time I have ever seen a reasonable, let alone personable, response come from that nebulous digital beast.
Fair play to the new CEO, he has won back one notch of respect and hopefully averted the slow motion train wreck that had probably already started at Paypal.
Why does it take a story to make it to front page Hacker News to get attention, to get a "direct channel" to the executives when things go wrong? It ignores the all the horrible complaints and stories from everybody else. It's inequity in itself when the only way you will get attention from big companies is from making posts on Hacker News.
Why are they not paying attention to their other day-to-day customers? What kind of business do you intend on building?
This isn't special... Yet. What happened here can happen even in the most dysfunctional customer service paradigms. A promblem randomly and luckily escalated from the people who can't do anything about the problem to the people who (generally speaking) won't do anything about the problem. As a lucky break, the person/department who generally won't do anything, decided in their mercy to do something this one time. IMHO, what was said in the email is just marketing duck-speak, no matter how sincere it sounds until proven otherwise.
The true fix, the actuall turnaround, is when the ability to actually fix problems like this is systemically extended deep into the space previously occupied by the employees who couldn't fix them before.
The thing is, this "fix" only came about outside of their entire customer service mechanism (AFAICT). How many more disenfranchised customers are going to get "a direct line" to @davidmarcus? My guess is "none."
This is a pure PR maneuver. The proof is in the pudding.
I am always wiery of these maneuvers because they can swing both ways. I must say, good for the CEO to response; smart man who realizes the company is going to get hit, hard, and soon.
The only question left is: to trust or not to trust?
Let's see if PP makes any official announcements on policy to combat this.
> The only question left is: to trust or not to trust?
RTFE. This entire thread is basically regurgitating what was already said in the email. It already says they hope to win back trust, but with action, not words. To trust or not to trust?
Email makes that very clear: wait and see what they do.
The idea is that Paypal will use this to event to understand how their systematic mistakes, and to fix them. That way, others won't need a direct line to the CEO.
Of course, they should have developed mechanisms to take customer feedback seriously before.
And they should have fixed this long ago.
But there's nothing wrong with learning from your mistakes so as not to repeat them.
Nobody's saying that "learning from your mistakes" is wrong. How do any of us know what "the idea" of this is, whether we'll hear anything more at all after this one person is taken care of? The funniest thing is that for all of the years that PP "should have fixed this long ago," this one event is what is to be used to understand their problems? What happened to all the other years? What happened to paypalsucks.com? There's are extensive lists, continually updated, of incidents like the one in this story.
The only leeway I give them is openness to the future, but from the past to the present, they are a seriously bad company for entrepreneurs. A business owner literally cannot know whether they'll be caught up in PayPal's various harmful practices, and this message from an executive is the smallest Dixie cup of water given to a one of a hospital full of burn victims.
"IMHO, what was said in the email is just marketing duck-speak, no matter how sincere it sounds until proven otherwise."
I agree that this looks like a PR stunt, but it also shows some potential changes underfoot at Paypal.
Here's my read of the situation: Paypal has been known for being beauracratic ever since the eBay acquisition, when all the smart people left and the bozos and middle managers remained. You know the type of place and the type of people it attracts: it's the smooth-talking-but-not-that-bright individuals who do well, and any smart employees who perceive the real problems the company is in find themselves a part of an outcast fringe.
Don't tell us we have bad customer service issues; expressing that kind of negative attitude is not going to impress senior management, what with bonus season coming up. Stripe and Square are just dipshit startups that no real business will ever use. La-la-la I can't hear you.
It seems someone at eBay finally realised PayPal was going to be "disrupted" if it didn't get a leader with their shit together. This new guy seems competent, but steering a big lumbering ship like PayPal away from its death course takes serious political/organisation-hacking skills, no matter how big the icebergs loom.
PayPal's reputation is so deep in the dirt that nothing any one at the company says will bring it back above ground. If someone says "we are changing X" and the changes actually happen, then eventually, over the course of time, Paypal's goodwill may return.
You're really overstating how "deep in the dirt" PayPal's reputation is, though. Some developers complain very loudly about PayPal, but just about everyone else continues to use the service.
They remain an interesting choice for anyone starting up a business that takes money online -- I have a business that I've partially migrated to Stripe (and I'll finish that up soon), but for about 9 YEARS before Stripe came along, every year I'd evaluate the available options for accepting payments, and come back to PayPal each time.
They certainly have trust and customer service issues -- and I've never allowed more than a few thousand to accumulate in the account for that reason -- but I have to admit I've only had technical problems with maybe 2-3 payments over those 9 years, never had my account locked, and generally just benefited from the flexibility and good rates.
My impression is that overall, they still have a middling to good reputation. Especially if they can fix the glaring problems remaining, I don't think they'll have any trouble staying strong for a long time.
Uh, you consider them to be something of a necessity, but you try to keep as little money as possible in the account because you fear your account will be frozen. I'd not say that they have "a middling to good reputation" - I'd say if that's what someone who speaks of them well thinks, that's an appalling reputation!
"it's the smooth-talking-but-not-that-bright individuals who do well, and any smart employees who perceive the real problems the company is in find themselves a part of an outcast fringe."
Yeah at the wrong companies it does definitely. You can bullshit your way in/out of anything, especially in big companies. Just find another job if that happens; if you are really smart and competent, there will be no problem finding something which does fit. Don't stick with elbowing morons, ever.
> It's the smooth-talking-but-not-that-bright individuals who do well, and any people who perceive the real problems the find themselves a part of an outcast fringe.
Change a few words and it can also apply to a "scene."
Not necessarily. Between writing that email & it being publish that CEO is now very much committed to this since its his reputation on the line now. He said he'll get it done.
Unfortunately there aren't a whole lot of details in the mail that one can call the CEO out for if it doesn't happen but its a good start and in my opinion more than a PR stunt.
Respectfully disagree. CEOs of multi-billion dollar publicly traded companies do not routinely reach out to disgruntled customers, no matter how public the PR disasters. Twitter has been very effectively leveraged in the past with various underperforming companies, however IIRC all of those cases were delegated to customer service / marketing personnel.
While you are correct that this intervention bore many of the hallmarks of a PR effort, the scope is unusual. While I am happy to be proven wrong, I would certainly be very surprised if anyone could dig up multiple examples of similar behavior on the part of a President/CEO or even any C-suite executive in a company of this size.
TL;DR: Personally looking after an account and handing out a cell phone number is not business as usual. There may be an element of PR, but it is quite proactive by most standards of measure.
This will prove to have been special only if it eventually proves to be normal, i.e. PayPal loses their reputation for opaque holds.
CEOs, like anyone, can lose interest in anything, due to lack of commitment or competing priorities. And no CEO lasts forever; the next CEO might not care as much as PayPal in the large currently doesn't care.
And an incoming CEO is not superman, it takes cooperation from below.
It is special that the CEO responded AND put his reputation on the line by saying he was going to fix this.
If he doesn't fix the problem, in a few months he's going to be inundated with blog posts saying "David Marcus promised this would be fixed and it isn't".
So he's set himself a very public (and difficult) challenge, and I respect that.
No, not a PR stunt. As a new CEO in an organization, it is difficult to get access to the kind of data and examples you need in order to create change throughout the organization. I've seen this first-hand advising new CEOs on their first 100-days as a consultant (before I started my startup). Good new CEOs will often try to find customer stories which capture the specific problems they're trying to fix, and use those stories to champion change. Frankly, this is pretty similar to a tactic used by politicians to illustrate their policy proposals with individual human stories. Marcus needs those stories now to create change in the company.
My hat goes off to Marcus, and I'm a bit surprised at the pessimism from HN. Tilt at windmills much?
Not tilting at windmills so much as a 'fool me once' wariness. But you're right, good leaders seek out customer stories in their own words and try to start conversations with those customers so they can hear the good and bad from the source. Otherwise it's all filtered by people trying to cover their butts.
I had the honor of actually having a direct email exchange with Steve Jobs in the context of difficulties doing business with Apple. In a last ditch effort to solve the issues I decided to email Steve. I had never done that before. While I was convinced that it was pointless, I did it anyway. It was three in the morning here in California. I was programming and shot off a two line email not saying much more that I needed help resolving a business issue with Apple.
Fifteen minutes later I get this:
What's the problem?
-Steve
I must have stared at that email for an hour. Not sure if it was a hoax or the real deal. I wasn't even sure that I had the right email address.
I replied anyway.
The next day I got a phone call from a high-level VP who had been asked by Steve to personally look into the issues. This led to many meetings and even a couple of trips up to Cupertino to meet them all and discuss further. The problem was addressed to everyone's satisfaction.
Having the CEO of a large company take the time to take personal ownership of an issue is special.
I've always wanted to have a spreadsheet or something to keep track of the "HN effect" in which companies respond to public outrages because of their publication here. Though of course they might also get attention from Reddit and other online outlets as well.
PayPal is starting to feel the pressure of all these new payment startups (eg. Square, Stripe) springing up around them. They know that if they're not careful with their brand image they're going to quickly lose their lunch in the next few years.
The most effective way to show displeasure with a business is to stop being a customer. Period. You can't blame the CEO here - he's simply trying to stop the bleeding before Hacker News reopens it with a machete.
I've briefly worked for a payment processor - and I'm not overstating here - but this industry doesn't give 1/2 a st about your feelings of them, their customer service, or what you think of their CEOs. They only care about getting as much money as possible. Period.
Peteris, keep posting of your experience and let's see if the CEO follows through. If he doesn't he'll lose twice as much respect and twice as many customers. If he does, then know you got some very expensive customer service, my friend.
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[ 3.0 ms ] story [ 277 ms ] threadhttp://allthingsd.com/20120907/paypals-new-president-faces-t...
http://techcrunch.com/2010/10/26/wepay-ice-paypal/
Put yourself in the position of somebody who is trying to commit massive fraud. E.g., by purporting to sell a bunch of stuff on-line. Every bit of information you have about how PayPal combats fraud is helpful. Every time PayPal gives somebody a reason, it helps fraudsters avoid that particular wall or trap, letting them probe the defenses elsewhere.
It's a hard problem. PayPal solved it the wrong way, but they'll never get to full transparency.
Couldn't you say make the same argument of proprietary vs open source software?
Also, they've intentionally chosen a domain where full security isn't possible, mostly due to circumstances outside their control. Remember, they captured a huge new market mainly through the sophistication of their anti-fraud systems. So security through obscurity has to remain a major tool for them.
Basically if you work in fraud detection (or broadly any kind of crime detection) you keep your techniques secret because otherwise you're helping the criminals avoid you.
Look at the source code for Reddit or Hacker News, notice how in the publicly released codebases they've both chosen specifically not to publish the code to do with vote-rigging detection.
There's a strong argument for secrecy.
Then, you need to understand how open PayPal is to fraud. I can easily commit major crimes using PayPal, and security has nothing to do with it.
This is the challenge they face. If you think it's an easy problem to solve, ask yourself: why is there no one else out there doing this same thing? Why are all the other supposed opponents limited in such drastic ways that PayPal is not?
I'm not suggesting they are perfect, but your trite remark is meaningless and ignorant of the realities of the system.
Also don't want to help competing services.
Another data point - spammers used to check their work against spam assassin, fine tuning them.
Another data point - leaked password databases are a source of heuristics for generating word lists.
I hope Paypal can get it together, but I live in fear of getting hosed by them without any recourse.
It's good that this executive (President, not the CEO as indicated in the title) is taking initiative to fix things at PayPal. But until things are fixed, PayPal is still a business risk.
True, but as you note in the second paragraph, this is still a major improvement. I stopped using Paypal a long time ago because of an utterly typical story: https://jseliger.wordpress.com/2011/12/09/december-2011-link... and have been encouraging other people not to use Paypal ever since.
It's almost impossible for Paypal to be worse than it is, and it might even get better.
What confuses me is that David acts as if these are new stories of accounts frozen, staggered access to money, and blocked recourse to customer chargebacks. This has been happening for years with hundreds of publicly written stories of bad will by PayPal.
I've been reading similar complaints to that for years. Some of which were far worse in my view (i.e. taking money out of banks to repay people who weren't even seeking a refund because PayPal changed its mind about someone's product or service).
Why does PayPal suddenly care? Is it because there is viable competition now?
Seems like about the right amount of time for him to start really kicking things into high gear imo.
Check your ignorance and entitlement at the door, please.
http://www.apra.gov.au/adi/Documents/cfdocs/PayPal-auth-and-...
They are classed as an ADI, which means banking rules applies to them.
Apparently he was ok with that, and I'm sure he's being well compensated for it.
PayPal has built up a lot of ill will, and no, it doesn't just go away with a promise to change. It is in fact going to take time.
Let's keep in mind that this offense just happened. It's not the distant past.
This is a non-solution, which is almost worse than doing nothing at all, because it's active disingenuity.
You can't win by solving just one person's problems. But you also can't win unless you start by solving one person's problems. And then fix the system, so that the kind of problem is less likely to recur.
This, IMHO, is exactly the right way to do it. As contrasted with the wrong way, which is for employees to sit in their comfy offices and avoid all direct contact with customers, making up bureaucratic solutions to imagined problems.
David Marcus was CEO of Zong, a small mobile payment startup who got bought by PayPal last year. When buying the company, the CEO of eBay Inc. asked him to change quiet a few things in the company culture. This email is one of the first step to improve customer service. Will he succeed I don't know, but you gotta give him the credit of trying.
Or if he routinely works from his ipad, and still have that as a signature, I'd be very doubtful of his capabilities.
They are seeing Stripe, Square, etc getting way more mindshare, and they are scared.
With all due respect PayPal, good riddance. You've sucked too hard for too long, and now we finally have alternatives.
I want this to be true. I want PayPal to believe that this behavior is harmful to their business and to push (at ALL levels of the company) to change how they treat their customers. But I won't give them the benefit of the doubt based on one message from the CEO. They burned their second chances long ago, and it's much harder to regain my trust after losing it. I hope that they do.
This is all a bunch of baloney. If PayPal was really serious about fixing all the pain and misery they caused, they would create a direct line of communication where those on the other end were empowered to resolve all problems ... instead of giving a curt "send us a letter".
Until PayPal starts working with their customers and stops treating them like criminals, I'll take my business elsewhere.
Do it in one go and you're talking a department of tens or hundreds of people, most of them newly hired. Turn them loose without careful thought and at the very least you create massive chaos in your organization. But you also probably create substantial losses as fraudsters use the chaos to take a lot of money.
I think the only way you can get to the customer service experience you want is by starting with one customer's problems, solving them, and then changing the organization a bit so it's less dumb. Then you rinse and repeat for years.
It's an organization of thousands of people across the globe, with a zillion lines of code and, a ton of procedures and habits, and a lot of institutional inertia. The way to solve it is by starting now in a manageable way, and that's what he claims he's doing.
I've seen it work. Hell, I've helped it work. This is a good sign.
How much more direct communication do you want?
We all want your mobile number. I have a 1000 angry friends who want to personally talk to you.
Thanks
I guess its never too late to stop sucking though.
And bitcoin. No matter how PayPal tries to put the kibosh on selling PayPal for bitcoin, people will still find a way around it.
I no longer use PayPal after their first and only abuse of my account. They had one chance and I found better solutions. That the CEO is sending out emails to high PR value customers is a very telling move.
Fair play to the new CEO, he has won back one notch of respect and hopefully averted the slow motion train wreck that had probably already started at Paypal.
Why are they not paying attention to their other day-to-day customers? What kind of business do you intend on building?
The true fix, the actuall turnaround, is when the ability to actually fix problems like this is systemically extended deep into the space previously occupied by the employees who couldn't fix them before.
This is a pure PR maneuver. The proof is in the pudding.
The only question left is: to trust or not to trust?
Let's see if PP makes any official announcements on policy to combat this.
RTFE. This entire thread is basically regurgitating what was already said in the email. It already says they hope to win back trust, but with action, not words. To trust or not to trust?
Email makes that very clear: wait and see what they do.
Of course, they should have developed mechanisms to take customer feedback seriously before.
And they should have fixed this long ago.
But there's nothing wrong with learning from your mistakes so as not to repeat them.
The only leeway I give them is openness to the future, but from the past to the present, they are a seriously bad company for entrepreneurs. A business owner literally cannot know whether they'll be caught up in PayPal's various harmful practices, and this message from an executive is the smallest Dixie cup of water given to a one of a hospital full of burn victims.
I agree that this looks like a PR stunt, but it also shows some potential changes underfoot at Paypal.
Here's my read of the situation: Paypal has been known for being beauracratic ever since the eBay acquisition, when all the smart people left and the bozos and middle managers remained. You know the type of place and the type of people it attracts: it's the smooth-talking-but-not-that-bright individuals who do well, and any smart employees who perceive the real problems the company is in find themselves a part of an outcast fringe.
Don't tell us we have bad customer service issues; expressing that kind of negative attitude is not going to impress senior management, what with bonus season coming up. Stripe and Square are just dipshit startups that no real business will ever use. La-la-la I can't hear you.
It seems someone at eBay finally realised PayPal was going to be "disrupted" if it didn't get a leader with their shit together. This new guy seems competent, but steering a big lumbering ship like PayPal away from its death course takes serious political/organisation-hacking skills, no matter how big the icebergs loom.
They remain an interesting choice for anyone starting up a business that takes money online -- I have a business that I've partially migrated to Stripe (and I'll finish that up soon), but for about 9 YEARS before Stripe came along, every year I'd evaluate the available options for accepting payments, and come back to PayPal each time.
They certainly have trust and customer service issues -- and I've never allowed more than a few thousand to accumulate in the account for that reason -- but I have to admit I've only had technical problems with maybe 2-3 payments over those 9 years, never had my account locked, and generally just benefited from the flexibility and good rates.
My impression is that overall, they still have a middling to good reputation. Especially if they can fix the glaring problems remaining, I don't think they'll have any trouble staying strong for a long time.
Extremely well said and sadly often true.
Change a few words and it can also apply to a "scene."
Unfortunately there aren't a whole lot of details in the mail that one can call the CEO out for if it doesn't happen but its a good start and in my opinion more than a PR stunt.
Respectfully disagree. CEOs of multi-billion dollar publicly traded companies do not routinely reach out to disgruntled customers, no matter how public the PR disasters. Twitter has been very effectively leveraged in the past with various underperforming companies, however IIRC all of those cases were delegated to customer service / marketing personnel.
While you are correct that this intervention bore many of the hallmarks of a PR effort, the scope is unusual. While I am happy to be proven wrong, I would certainly be very surprised if anyone could dig up multiple examples of similar behavior on the part of a President/CEO or even any C-suite executive in a company of this size.
TL;DR: Personally looking after an account and handing out a cell phone number is not business as usual. There may be an element of PR, but it is quite proactive by most standards of measure.
CEOs, like anyone, can lose interest in anything, due to lack of commitment or competing priorities. And no CEO lasts forever; the next CEO might not care as much as PayPal in the large currently doesn't care.
And an incoming CEO is not superman, it takes cooperation from below.
Good luck, hope it works out for them.
If he doesn't fix the problem, in a few months he's going to be inundated with blog posts saying "David Marcus promised this would be fixed and it isn't".
So he's set himself a very public (and difficult) challenge, and I respect that.
My hat goes off to Marcus, and I'm a bit surprised at the pessimism from HN. Tilt at windmills much?
I had the honor of actually having a direct email exchange with Steve Jobs in the context of difficulties doing business with Apple. In a last ditch effort to solve the issues I decided to email Steve. I had never done that before. While I was convinced that it was pointless, I did it anyway. It was three in the morning here in California. I was programming and shot off a two line email not saying much more that I needed help resolving a business issue with Apple.
Fifteen minutes later I get this:
I must have stared at that email for an hour. Not sure if it was a hoax or the real deal. I wasn't even sure that I had the right email address.I replied anyway.
The next day I got a phone call from a high-level VP who had been asked by Steve to personally look into the issues. This led to many meetings and even a couple of trips up to Cupertino to meet them all and discuss further. The problem was addressed to everyone's satisfaction.
Having the CEO of a large company take the time to take personal ownership of an issue is special.
I've briefly worked for a payment processor - and I'm not overstating here - but this industry doesn't give 1/2 a st about your feelings of them, their customer service, or what you think of their CEOs. They only care about getting as much money as possible. Period.
Peteris, keep posting of your experience and let's see if the CEO follows through. If he doesn't he'll lose twice as much respect and twice as many customers. If he does, then know you got some very expensive customer service, my friend.