After setting up a Stripe account for a client years ago, and it working well for a while, my client noticed that deposits hadn't been hitting their account anymore. I updated and reconfirmed bank account details, but deposits kept failing. Now that stripe had thousands of dollars just pending and failing to deposit every 2 days, I reached out to support@stripe.com.

Over the course of the last week, their support team has failed to respond in their 24-hour promised timeframe multiple times, offered no assistance beyond "Checking into this...".

After waiting two days, I emailed their general support line a second time and got a new agent who had no record of my previous conversation. (That's reassuring.) Considering my client's business is in danger with this amount of money just being held from them, I'm not sure what to do.

They offer no phone support, and it seems their email support is basically "Let me look into it" and then no further responses.

Any suggestions? I'm not sure what I should advise my client to do.

Update: Stripe contacted me this morning and confirmed they had a bug in their system, which they resolved.

However, I don't understand why people are saying they handled this like champs or that they are providing good customer support when they ignored my client and me for a week. (Which still hasn't been explained.)

Ignoring a customer with a problem, saying agents will follow up when they don't, and then resolving it only when It goes to the top of DN isn't good customer service. It shows significant flaws in the way they have designed their support channels.

Design can't stop at just the product or interface, but should be integrated into the entire experience. That includes customer service and support. If you build a system that allows for customers to process large sums of money, their livelihood, and then fail to assist when it goes sideways: your product is poorly designed.

I hope this helps others, including designers, who have the ability to influence the support protocols will take this message to heart. I hope more will understand and realize that service design deserves as much attention as the interface.