"you are now at the mercy of the customer service representative, who is asked to make “a judgment call.”
Wrong, the CSR never makes judgment. This is for services like Account Review. So you can yell at or sweet talk to the guy on the phone, it won't change much.
Anyway it's sad that PayPal shows almost no progress year after year to handle legitimate "small" business, especially when they cancel transactions of goods already delivered. But people need to READ THE TOS. We're talking about MONEY, being on a shiny Internet website does not change that fact.
In the phone call I had with a PayPal executive after the Christmas debacle, It was stated to me that when an account is frozen for bringing in too much money too quickly, the CS representative taking calls is asked to "make a judgment call. " In our case, "they made a very, very incorrect one."
That's my entire complaint with this process. In any other business, a good customer who makes you money gets dedicated customer service. Your account is treated carefully. That's not how they do it there.
I also want to say that I understand the compulsion to lay blame at the feet of the person being screwed over in stories like these ("They used the wrong button!" "They didn't read the TOU!"). Human nature is such that we have to find fault with the person on the receiving end of treatment like this. We desperately want to believe that if we'e very good, nothing bad will ever happen to us.
>I also want to say that I understand the compulsion to lay blame at the feet of the person being screwed over in stories like these ("They used the wrong button!" "They didn't read the TOU!"). Human nature is such that we have to find fault with the person on the receiving end of treatment like this. We desperately want to believe that if we'e very good, nothing bad will ever happen to us.
I'd say this is roughly 50/50. While Paypal's customer service is legendarily bad, and there's no excuse for not providing a method to talk to a live human, there's also no excuse for not reading the T&C and knowing what you can and cannot do, moreso if you're a business. This is a friggin' payment processor. One of your lifelines as a business. Not reading the terms is one of the dumbest possible things I can think of doing.
And this isn't a case of fine print, either. It's not hard to find Paypal's policy on preorders, or other things which you are specifically not supposed to do, and in fact agreed in advance not to do when you signed up.
You'd think that people knowing in advance that they're dealing with the devil would make them scrutinize the details that much more...
I stand corrected then. Process must be different when they call.
You are right about the human nature. Marketing is also to blame. You read "Accept money now ! click here and be ready in 5 minutes." so that's what you start doing, and it works great for a moment.
Unfortunately, its impossible to get the email of a real singular person at Account Review to interact with, let alone get them on the phone, or even fly there to meet them in person. Sounds absurd, but if I had to buy a $200 plane ticket to get $20K unfrozen, I'd do it.
Instead, they just stonewall you, keep the fees, hold your money and provide no way for you to make things right.
I am a former PayPal Resolution CSR and I was always making request for the fees to be refunded and it was usually accepted. It was ridiculous to the point that account was suspended because of a negative balance due to fees.
I have heard of people coming to the call center with baseball bat to get their money, so paying a place ticket is not that stupid :)
Any tips to how to actually deal with Paypal when something goes "bad" on your account (frozen, 21-day holds put on it, etc, etc) and you really need to talk to a human and get real resolution?
I must say we were trained to give the best service. Now resolution cases can be hard to figure out for an agent (especially as no one is assigned to an account, so it's random at each call).
Now, as in a lot of companies, you can try to be an asshole, call again and again, ask to be called back, send mail after mail, ask to speak to a senior agent etc. At some point it can trigger a special handling of your case, but everyone want you to disappear.
It almost feels as if someone at Paypal read my comments today and acted on my account just for fun. It turns out that around 2 hours after posting this I got another one of the lovely "we're holding your money for 21 days" letters, which is really annoying. No returns on my account, no complaints, nothing. Fully verified and long term customer. I happened to buy/sell a few things and used Paypal for payments, and I almost feel punished now for using it.
I'm going to try and get in touch with customer service, but I have the feeling I'm going to get a stock response that's cut/pasted.
Last week, Google decided to ban my Adsense account and refund advertisers because my website was a risk. The money was there for years and I removed Adsense from my blog YEARS ago. I can't contact anyone about it and can't enter Adsense now for any new website I would make.
Wrong, the CSR never makes judgment. This is for services like Account Review. So you can yell at or sweet talk to the guy on the phone, it won't change much.
Anyway it's sad that PayPal shows almost no progress year after year to handle legitimate "small" business, especially when they cancel transactions of goods already delivered. But people need to READ THE TOS. We're talking about MONEY, being on a shiny Internet website does not change that fact.