My First Day Doing Customer Service A Guy Threatened To Hire A Team of Hackers to ‘F*ck With Our Sh*t’
Every crisis is an opportunity to demonstrate good customer service — whether it’s a lesson in how to stay calm, cool and collected when dealing with disgruntled customers, or how a bad experience can expose the flaws in our system allowing us to improve things going forward.
A few months ago, I had a 10-email back and forth conversation with (let’s just call him Dave), an unhappy customer. Dave spent 1.69 ETH (market value = $950 ) buying 27 EOS (market value = $330). He over spent about $600 for the EOS. Whose fault is it? Well, there’s blame to go around.
First, we need to understand how a decentralized exchange works:
A decentralized exchange (DEX) matches people looking to buy cryptocurrencies at a particular price with those willing to sell. It’s decentralized because order matching happens without a third party. Instead, assets trade wallet-to-wallet (i.e. P2P).
It’s similar to Expedia, which compares rates for flights and hotel rooms across the internet — making it easy to compare rates — and then charges the hotel a fee to connect with buyers. So, let’s say you got to your hotel room and the A/C is broken. Now you want a refund. Should Expedia refund your money? Well, they can’t, because Expedia doesn’t own the hotel. If there is an issue with the room, your issue is with hotel.
When Dave placed his order, there were only a few people willing to sell EOS at that time, meaning Dave paid more than the market rate. This is what we call: low liquidity. It’s perhaps the greatest challenge facing DEXs today, and isn’t unique to any one in particular.
Dave went on to ask for a refund, but unfortunately (just like with Expedia) Dave didn’t buy the EOS from EasyTrade, he bought it from a trader who put the order together. As much as we’d like to give Dave a refund, we never had his money in the first place.
The beauty of a decentralized exchange is the ability to purchase assets from different exchanges, allowing you to shop for the best available price. The downside is that if you buy it at a price that was higher than you originally intended, there is no recourse for refund. Even when Dave threatened to have team of hackers “f*ck with our sh*t,” there was nothing we could do for him.
While in college, I used to work as a bouncer at a nightclub. I’ve dealt with a few Daves. Some Daves are aborrant, some expose flaws in the system providing an opportunity to create something better.
To be honest, we all have a little Dave in us. We’ve all been frustrated with some company, product, or order, and doubly frustrated when we’re told there’s no remedy for the situation.
Now, is this 100% Dave’s fault? No. And now we have to make sure that this doesn’t happen to anyone else. The benefit of acting as a broker is that there’s really a small number of circumstances in which someone would have a bad experience, i.e. paying more than they originally intended to pay.
Here’s what we can do
I’m reminded of how Uber dealt with complaints from users unaware of “surge pricing,” later realizing they had spent $200 on a 15 minute ride. Uber was heavily criticized for not clearly alerting their users when surge pricing was in effect, but now they do.
Going forward EasyTrade will more clearly inform users about the risks of trading in a moment of low liquidity. We are adding a feature alerting users that the price they’re about to agree to is X% above market value (e.g. the price on CoinMarketCap).
Not only will adding this extra layer of protection/transparency help alleviate this situation for us (and our customer service rep: me), it will hopefully reduce the number of bad incidents for our users.
At EasyTrade, this is the type of open, crystal-clear relationship we want to have with you: our readers, our users, our community. We want your feedback, because even if you hate us, we’ll use it as an opportunity to grow, to become stronger, and to more perfectly deliver on our promise to offer every token at the best available rate.
