Why Is Frontline B2B Customer Support So Hard? Part 3

Sick of me yet?  I sincerely wish I had a positive support case to wax ecstatic about, but alas.  And because I’ve been told the best blog posts come out in threes, you are spared the one about Crate & Barrel in which I’ve been waiting 5 months for a non-defective cushion that’s been delivered twice, defective.

This post is about Mercury, the newest online fintech abstraction layer that makes it easy for startups to bank.  Guess SVB and First Republic left a hole, eh?

I got a notification the evening before payday that Mercury was not honoring two payroll debits for ~200K.  We had no money in the checking account - everything was in a Treasury account - so there was no way to immediately move funds.  I had put automatic transfer rules on the Treasury account back in September (this incident was in mid-April) and after logging in, saw that they had never worked.  We’d been draining to zero.  I logged into Gusto, our payroll provider, and there was no error there.  There was nothing I could do before bed except initiate a Treasury transfer and hope that payroll would indeed go through.

Why hadn’t I ever caught this, or realized the checking account looked low, you wonder?  Why hadn’t our controller, or our temp CFO?  Unclear.  We all had messed up.  

The next morning, I woke up and verified that everyone had received their paychecks.  I immediately called Mercury support and spoke with Jean (not her real name).  I explained the problem, that the rules I had set had disappeared, that for sure Gusto would try to re-debit that day and it would fail, and that there was a pending Treasury transfer.  After much back and forth, I had to escalate to her manager.  Jean wasn’t getting that it was MERCURY’S problem for having deleted the ruleset.  She refused to let me speak with the manager, and refused to let me stay on hold.  She did, however, say that it was in “management’s hands” as to whether or not they could do anything.  Fine.  I hung up.

Shortly thereafter, 9:52am, I received this back:

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Hi Elizabeth, 

Our team has agreed to issue a one-time provisional credit of $182,569.55 in order to cover the payroll expenses.

Please note that this is a one-time credit and the funds will be recouped once the Treasury transfer is completed.

Before proceeding, we require written confirmation that you fully understand this credit is temporary and will be reversed once the Treasury transfer settles.

Once we receive your confirmation, we’ll move forward with granting the credit.

We look forward to your response.

Best, 

Jean

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I responded immediately, she wrote back that they were working on it, and not thirty minutes later, it was done:

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Hi Liz, 

Just following up to let you know that the one-time credit has been deposited.

You can view the transaction here.

Best, 

Jean

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Nice!  They’re fronting me the money.  That’s awesome.  And unexpected!  Except… what about the thing that caused the problem in the first place? 

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Hi Jean,

Thank you, I see it.  Please let me know once Treasury hits and it's reversed.

Do you have an update on what happened to the rules we set back in Q4 2024 that would have prevented this from happening?

Thanks again,

Liz

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And I receive back, promptly:

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Hi Elizabeth, 

Regarding the transfer rules, I confirmed with my team that Treasury transfer rules only occur on the 1st and 15th of each month, and this has always been the case.

With the current rule you have in place, please note that transfers will only occur on the 1st and 15th of each month, regardless of your account balance at any other time.

To clarify: This rule is designed to help you maintain a desired balance in your checking or savings account by connecting it to Treasury. On the 1st and 15th, the rule will check your account balance and automatically transfer funds to or from Treasury as needed to reach your target balance. You can verify this here and review all available rule options: Setting up auto transfer rules

While we’re not able to view the specific rule that was previously active, the current rule is set up to function as expected moving forward.

As discussed over the phone, you might consider updating your profile allocation to the new fund option. This would allow for same-day Treasury transfers in situations where you need quicker access to your funds.

You’ll see the option to enable this directly on your Treasury landing page within your dashboard.

In the meantime, if you have any questions at all, please don’t hesitate to reach out — otherwise, I’ll follow up once we begin the recoupment process.

Best, 

Jean

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Now I’m pissed.  We covered this in the call, I stated that I understood how rules worked, but that it WASN’T actually the problem.  The problem was that the rule disappeared.  Furthermore, she’s now lying: she can investigate prior rules being set; she’s choosing not to.

And so I write back:

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Hi Jean,

Yes, I understand how the transfers work.  Thank you for explaining it again.

It is hard for me to have confidence in the new rule that we created because the old one just disappeared.  As a fintech company sitting atop a bank, you must have a record of it being created and subsequently deleted in a database somewhere.  I cannot see any audit log in our UI that we have access to.

Like I said on the phone and we discussed, it's imperative we get to the bottom of where it went.  Was it a Sandgarden user error?  Did it never get set in the Mercury database?  Did a bug in a software release make it disappear without notice? 

We really need to get to the bottom of this.  It is the first time anything of this magnitude has happened to me in 15 years of startup banking - with Boston Private, then with SVB, now with Mercury - and it caused a major ruckus, both for you and for us.

Thanks,

Liz

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Wouldn’t Mercury WANT to know if something failed on their side?  Wouldn’t they want to understand if they had a bug?  Wouldn’t they (honestly) want to at least passive aggressively tell me to f*ck off if indeed it was MY fault because I wasted much of their team’s time AND caused them to do something extraordinary (front me the money)?  I’d want to know as CEO.  I’ve done investigations like this for customers before, where we promise something and deliver another.  

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Hi Elizabeth, 

My team is currently looking into this further.

I’ll follow up with additional information as soon as I hear back from them.

Best,

Jean

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So there IS something else you can do!  I wonder why she agreed to do it now?  Did she think she could redirect my energy and I’d just move on?  Did a manager step in?  Unclear.

Sure enough, the next day:

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Hi Liz, 

Thank you again for your patience as we’ve looked into this further.

After checking in with our internal team, I wanted to share what we’ve confirmed on our side. In our system, we don’t maintain a visible history of edits to auto-transfer rules — however, when a rule is deleted, it isn’t fully removed from our database. Instead, we mark it as deleted, which allows us to retain some historical visibility.

In your case, we only see one auto-transfer rule associated with your account — the one created on April 14th. There’s no record in our database of any previously existing rule being created and then deleted. This suggests that no prior rule was set, unless it had been manually removed by our team. Based on a internal review, there’s no indication that such a manual removal occurred.

While it’s possible that a prior rule existed, we’ve confirmed that it was not deleted by anyone on your team or ours. If the previous rule was configured to move funds from your Treasury account, the next scheduled transfer would not have been triggered until after the pull had already occurred.

We hope this helps bring some clarity to the situation, and that it reassures you of our continued commitment to supporting you. 

Please don’t hesitate to reach out if you have any further questions or concerns.

Kindly, 

Jean

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So I was correct.  Jean did lie.  Or at the least, didn’t want to invest the effort investigating.  Why she did ultimately remains unclear.  What we do know is that 1) the rule either wasn’t set properly and messaged that it was [as my controller and I both remember seeing it], and 2) it was set properly but deleted somehow.  She actually is still fixated on her original email back - the timing of the transfer itself - which is completely irrelevant because transfers would have been happening every two weeks no matter what so we never would have been in this situation in the first place.  I’ll also add that Jean’s grasp of English and concepts wasn’t fantastic on the phone; who is responding to my tickets, I wonder?

Zooming out, Mercury support was overall great.  I was going to go negative for an unknown reason and they fronted me money.  That’s AWESOME.  It was the fight to get it escalated to management, as well as her promise to go through everything we discussed on the phone, reneging on it though a lack of thorough follow up, and the me having to call bullshit that turned this from what could have been maybe the best support of my adult life into yet another disappointing experience.

That’s the rub.  Fighting to get help, broken promises, the customer having to fight to understand the why post-resolution… and do I in hindsight even believe her team looked at logs to see if something got deleted or was inadvertently mis-set in a release or any number of other bugs?  No.  I do not.

This is the problem with phone support in general.  I get off the phone and I have no control as to the resolution.  It’s why I resisted getting off the phone with her in the first place.  I mentioned an issue with Crate & Barrel above… the same thing is happening.  I verified on the phone with the rep that an item would be inspected thoroughly, except that what’s happening isn’t that.  Non-continuous problem solving is rife with failure and the frustration is all the customer’s.

Will I stay with Mercury?  Probably.  Their UI is fairly easy to use, and they did come through in a massive pinch.  Do I trust them though?  Can’t say.  What I can say is this: don’t lie.  Just say you won’t do it.  At least that way my expectations won’t be cratered, and I won’t get upset.  I’ll just expect mediocrity and we can both move on with life.  

But then we wouldn’t have this glorious blog post, now would we ;)