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Comment by jlokier | Hacker News Reader

After 5 days of trying to get my bank account at Revolut unblocked so I could pay my rent with the cash locked up in it, having chatted with maybe 5 representatives, waited for hours each time (their only official contact channel was in-app chat and you had to wait hours for a response), got told "since you are not replying I'm closing this chat" a couple of times in the middle of the night while I was asleep having sent a query hours before, and uploaded requested photos of documents, cards and id... I took someone's advice and posted to their Facebook chat.

The account was unblocked within 20 minutes.

Their social media person miraculously had the ability to ask someone to fix the problem, who miraculously got in touch within a few minutes and pressed the miraculous "fix problem" button in Revolut, which a series of "customer support" agents somehow couldn't do for most of a week.

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I had a similar issue with revolut - there is zero ability to contact them if you can't login to your account, after a week of abusing business sign-up to not get any useful response I filed a complaint with the financial regulator, within a few hours of them receiving it they magically called me and resolved it there and then. (I don't have a Twitter account or anything) Also, that complaint will stay on file and guides the regulator when reviewing licenses etc down the road so you should also file them as a matter of course- they would prefer social media because they don't have to answer to authorities about their behaviour.

But either way I don't use them anymore as they're just not reliable in a situation where you might be stranded etc.

Frontline support is oftentimes outsourced to firms like Arise Virtual Solutions [1] and workers typically have very little authority to escalate or fix more complex issues. Social media people usually have channels to marketing and other teams and are explicitly instructed to escalate the "trending" cases

[1] https://www.propublica.org/article/meet-the-customer-service...

Well, that's the explanation, and yeah, most people here knew it already.

But every thing with that is wrong. That part in particular "workers typically have very little authority to escalate or fix more complex issues" is a plain and straight refusal to solve any problem the company may cause.

What fascinates me is that companies obsessed with KPIs don't seem to independently count unfixed issues.

Firewalling customer support behind another company or division is okay, but at least make sure you have a parallel feedback mechanism to know how they're doing!

Social media support seems like the shitty version of this, but it's not rocket science to be able to regularly independently audit a random subset of issues by your CSR contractor. Internal audits have been standard practice in similar healthcare scenarios for decades.

Customer support, at a company that is not obsessed with customer support and satisfaction, is typically "check the box". They have to provide some sort of support. It is seen as a cost center rather than as a face of the company. "number of unfixed issues" isn't relevant if you perceive customer support as perfunctory.

As a result, for many companies obsessed with KPIs, the only KPI for customer support is "price". In that lens, they are optimizing.

Obviously this situation is awful for customers.

Granted in practice, but my point is that engineering should care.

If you've got nice insulation from your customers, how do you even know what you built is working?

I've seen too many bizarre real-world failure cases and complex systems-on-systems to trust that my metrics are capturing everything that breaks.

Revolut is a terrible company with an insane CEO exploiting its workers[0][1][2].

There are better alternatives like TransferWise or N26.

[0]: https://www.wired.co.uk/article/revolut-employment-coronavir...

[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19280131

[2]: https://www.wired.co.uk/article/revolut-trade-unions-labour-...

I'd love to move away from Revolut but neither of those options seem to offer a virtual credit card which is my main use case. Online purchases in US, EUR, GBP etc without having to worry about exchange fees or supported payment methods.

Wise does offer virtual cards as well as a physical one.

Just had a look, looks like you need to first get a physical Wise card in order to get a virtual one (not the case for Revolut), and it's only available in a rather limited number of countries.

https://wise.com/help/articles/5O9VNQR4wt3iXwV0Dmm6zB/how-do...

Depends on the country you’re account is in. I got virtual cards before ever ordering the physical card.

But keep in mind it’s a bank debit card (charge immediately comes off your balance), not a credit card.

I've had experiences with Revolut, too. I only use them for their stocks feature, in which I have shares. Once they're sold, I'll move all the money over to Free trade (which is honestly way better IMO). So, that, along with having a handy backup debit card handy, should I have to max out the ATM limit on my other two cards :-)

In my experience community managers are in the actual offices of the companies whilst support are a 3rd party overseas. So the CM is able to walk to someone's desk and get it fixed while the support can only try and escalate through their system.

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