Hacker News Reader

Comment by Cthulhu_ | Hacker News Reader

It makes sense to a point because Discord is neat and having a ticket system in there is convenient, plus it seems to be a service aimed at gamers, most of which will have a Discord account already (if they're on PC anyway).

View on HN

Why do they need a ticket system for account deletion? Won’t a normal delete button be good enough? They shouldn’t force their own internal process on to customers, they could easily have that button use the Discord API to create a ticket.

Account deletion isn't a very glamorous project and isn't something you can put on your list of yearly accomplishments for a raise. This probably rolled downhill until customer service asked the front end team to put up a static webpage with some crude instructions. I've seen worse, but rarely.

They’ve clearly went through the process of setting this up with Discord, so it sounds like they thought about this. This day and age, I almost expect every product to have a delete button.

Well, it should be if you ask me. When a user wants to delete his account, it usually is because he isn't happy with the company or the service. I could imagine that by making the deletion as painless and fast as possible, a company could go a long way to regain that user later. Some "sorry to see you leave, but we try to make as easy for you as possible" message and maybe even a goody the user can use elsewhere. After all, the account deletion is an opportunity to get in direct contact with your users in a critical point of the relationship.

Customer retention is a pretty critical business function, but in my experience the people approving raises etc generally have a much tighter relationship with the sales team. New revenue is a sales function, customer retention is a operations function. A big part of Steve Ballmer becoming CEO (and also his decline) was his sales first strategy.

Windows 8 might have been a huge flop for Ballmer over the long-run (arguably why he was asked to resign), but I bet the people working on Windows 8 features saw their careers advance much faster than the equally talented people fixing driver bugs for Windows 7. And the Windows 7 driver team is probably going to think designing a new ticketing system for deleting accounts is beneath them and let that project roll downhill. And so on.

The ticket process would involve the CS agent pressing a delete account button, so the majority of the work is already done, exposing the button to the user directly is very easy.

Discord has(had?) the worst account management system I've ever experienced. I've never seen a site that makes it so hard to log in/sign up/reset passwords, etc. I think it was fixed for the most part now but I'm still bitter about discord.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com