Address issues in paying for S3 storage with STORJ, the process is broken

I signed up for S3 storage, I sent $500 in STORJ to get it started, I got an email 5 days later threatening to close my ticket, it was the first email I had, I have nothing in the spam folder despite the support personnel insisting I did. Then Zendesk forces me to create a zendesk account so they can further pilfer my personal data as an ABSOLUTE REQUIREMENT for me to have access to the S3 storage I literally already paid you for almost a week ago now. Meanwhile, I just used google instead, I went and asked for S3 storage and it was made available to me immediately, like every other S3 provider in the world. Now we will be faced with a migration to STORJ later, costs, and money lost to us to do so, all because of your systems inefficiencies in onboarding. This has pretty much been the worst experience I have ever had trying to buy some storage.

This is not the way you are going to win, taking money, refusing service, taking a week post payment to provide services, requiring additional logins on additional unrelated systems so you can pilfer personal data even more, all of it is just, bad taste in the mouth city.

I tolerated it because I want this to happen, but anyone who is just thinking about STORJ compared to their competition, I would have walked away long ago and never looked at your service again. You can’t do it like this, you need to recognize this process is broken and unacceptable by the community or else, we can never expect that you will resolve it. Your support doesn’t seem to see an issue with the process as it stands.

Please put in a feature request to re-address how you handle taking crypto payment or handling of how you provide services to those who you have taken payment from. We use coinpayments, we use S3 from at least 2 other providers, we don’t have this issue, its evident its an issue in your policy and process. Please consider addressing, for STORJ, STORJ holders and STORJ users.

Regards

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Thank you for your feedback!
I forwarded it to the Team.
Sorry for inconvenience related to the manual process of confirmation of your account ownership!

P.s. I did respond as soon as I awaked (5 hours after your request), unfortunately seems you missed my response due to the too aggressive spam filter on your email server. Then a few days later, an automatic reminder sent you a request to make sure the issue was still valid. Only then was your spam filter allowed to see my messages.

First off, thank you for using the Storj Service, and thank you for persevering around the rough edges of the payment process. There are a couple of things in your message that warrant a more thorough response.

Let’s start with the payment process. We are working on an update to the billing and payment module. There is a lot of room for improvement here, especially in making it easy for the community to run a Satellite and be able to easily manage billing and payment in STORJ. There are a number of things coming together that make this a challenging problem to address (looking at you ETH transaction costs) but the L2 ecosystem is showing a lot of promise. We wish this could move faster, but we’re aware of the challenges and we’re working on addressing them. Again, we appreciate the feedback and that your use of the service.

The second area is our support process. Our support team uses Zendesk to make sure that when we receive reports from customers or node operators, we’re able to make sure we respond quickly, then can track the issue through to resolution. The support process requires that we be able to communicate with the people reporting issues. We regularly review the process to make it as streamlined as possible, but as it stands today, we do require an email. I apologize if the automated emails came across as threatening and this is a good opportunity to review the email templates to make sure the tone we want to express is appropriately reflected.

The team that provides frontline support is made up of Storj employees and members of the community. The one thing I can say unequivocally is that they care about and are invested in the success of our customers and the community.

With regard to collecting personal data, I’d encourage you to check out our disclosures page. If nothing else, we strive to be as transparent as possible with our community. We take privacy and security very seriously. We don’t collect user data for any other purpose than to provide a great service and customer experience. We don’t use third-party trackers and we don’t share or aggregate data. Data and metadata stored on the service are encrypted and we don’t and can’t mine your data.

I want to make sure that we acknowledge your feedback and that we’ve passed your feedback on to the product manager responsible for billing and payments. Hopefully, you’re otherwise happy with the service. If you’re interested in providing feedback on your experience with the actual storage service, we can schedule a user feedback session at your convenience.

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John, thank you for your detailed response. I actually have chatted back and forth at length today with Aleksey Leonov. If that is actually a Zendesk personnel, they are really doing a great job for you guys and really impressive for an outsourced helpdesk.

One of the things I expressed to Aleksey was that having to create an account on the extra system to put in a ticket makes sense. What I don’t understand is why this needs to be routed to support at this point in the process. The platforms knows how much money I have deposited to my wallet (I hadn’t even logged out since I paid) and it knows the cost of 3 months of the services requested. Aleksey expressed the additional verification for crypto versus credit card is a security measure to prevent unauthorized usage of funds of which I would like to recommend instead, just integrate 2fa onto DCS and allow users to manage their subscription directly through the interface whether its credit card or crypto. At minimum seems we could forego the extra verification if the user both purchases and applies the credit under the same login session.

The ETH fees are a challenge for all blockchain projects right now, it has been interesting to see the various approaches but ultimately hopefully we see the progress in ETH2.0 implementation and find acceptable fees natively. If I only have to spend ETH to write the storage contract and perhaps to add additional keys, that’s not too bad especially if timed out while fees are lower.

Well either way it sounds like you guys are aware that there are some inefficiencies in the process and are working to resolve them, that’s great news. As I expressed to Aleksey, I think STORJ has the right formula for real adoption and we intend to be a part of that adoption.

2 Likes

Thank you for your warm words, I appreciate that!
I’m Aleksey Leonov, Zendesk doesn’t provide personnel to us, it’s just a Helpdesk platform.
So, we are not share your information outside Storj.

If only there was something like Alexey-as-a-Service!

4 Likes