Customer support: failure is not an option

I’d like to introduce Dan Romero, our new General Manager of Coinbase. As we rapidly grow, we are structuring our organization to be nimble and scale with speed. Dan’s first priority as GM will be improving the Coinbase customer experience. He has been an early superstar employee at Coinbase and I’m excited about him taking on this huge job. Dan will provide an update on what we are doing to improve the experience and I will continue to post about all of the major activities at the company. –Brian

Thanks, Brian. My number one priority for Coinbase is providing our customers with a great experience. We have been failing at this and it is totally unacceptable. It’s no excuse but we think we owe you an explanation of what happened in 2017, what we’ve done and what we are doing to fix the issues.

The Coinbase customer base grew significantly last year and we began substantial efforts to scale all of our teams and systems to meet this growth. Brian publicly committed to focusing on the fundamentals and to significantly scaling and improving our customer support. And looking at the data, I was optimistic this would be solved at the end of the year.

But I was wrong! — we experienced even more growth in the last 2 quarters of 2017 than our most aggressive forecasts. For example, in November and December, we grew our support capability more than 60% which was meant to be sufficient based on peak 2017 support volumes we had experienced. But transaction volumes in November and December grew by 295%. This led to many customers experiencing long wait times from hearing back from our customer support team. The team was left feeling like we were bailing out a sinking ship with pots and pans — but we are now even more motivated than ever.

The good news is this growth means digital currency continues to expand and mature into the transformational technology we all believe it is destined to become. The bad news is many customers have had a poor experience with our product. This is unacceptableand the team and I will continue to work day and night to shorten response times to support inquiries, reduce payment delays, process limit increase requests, and improve identity verification. Brian has given our team all the resources we need to get the job done.

Realistically, this will take some time — but we are sparing no expense and are committed to making these improvements as fast as humanly possible. Below is some additional context about our priorities for ensuring a great customer experience, what we have done to improve it recently and what we are doing next. I plan to update our customers regularly on our progress.

Thank you for being a customer.

–Dan Romero, Vice President & General Manager of Coinbase

Our company priorities: security of customer funds, performance and customer support

Coinbase’s priorities, in order, are: 1) maintaining the safety and security of customer funds; 2) ensuring our platform is available even during periods of high volumes; and 3) resolving customer support inquiries in a timely manner.

Over the past year, we’ve scaled our platform capacity (measured in peak transactions per hour) by 7,700%. Additionally, we’ve increased our support capability 887% by hiring hundreds of support agents.

The increase in support capacity came as a result of significant investments in our infrastructure, staffing and types of support offered. Specifically, we rolled out:

• 24-hour support to all customers across multiple time zones and locations
• 24-hour, 5 days weekday phone support for customers with trust and safety, ID verification and limit request issues
• An improved knowledge base and chat bot to help with more general questions

What we are doing to provide a better customer support experience

However, despite scaling our support capability 887%, we are still not consistently meeting customer expectations for response times given unprecedented volume growth. Therefore we are committing to:

• Double the size of our customer support team over the next three months
• Expand phone support to 24-hours, 7 days per week to all customers for any issue by Q2 2018
• Hire a dedicated operations team based in London for our UK and European customers to focus on trust and safety issues, payment processing, customer on-boarding and limit increase requests
• Launch new ID verification and wire automation systems

As we build out additional support capability, we will continue to prioritize support cases in the following order:

1. Trust and safety issues (e.g. account access, identity verification)
2. Customer funds (wires/transfers)
3. Limit requests
4. General questions

We appreciate your patience as we continue to scale our platform and our team. Thank you for being a customer.

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Customer support: failure is not an option was originally published in The Coinbase Blog on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

The Coinbase Blog - Medium