Coinbase Has Hired an Army of Support Staff to Keep Customers Happy

Coinbase has addressed its checkered history of customer service complaints in a new blog post.

By Tim Hakki

In brief

• There has been a 5x increase in the number of Coinbase support staff since January.
• Customer contact rate has been reduced by 70%.
• More live help features are expected in the coming months.

Tired of Coinbase’s customer support? Help is here, says the crypto exchange, which yesterday blogged about the army of support agents it has hired to address its customers’ snags with the service and outlined more measures yet to come. 

Since Brian Armstrong founded the company nine years ago, complaints from customers have racked up. In 2018, Mashable obtained a 134-page report of customer complaints through a Freedom of Information Access request to the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission. 

The picture that emerged back then was that disgruntled Coinbase users generally had two problems: either their funds had mysteriously disappeared—often prompting accusations that Coinbase itself had sequestered the money—or they'd been locked out of their accounts. 

When Coinbase went public in April of this year, The New York Times reported that Coinbase customers still flagged the recurring problems of disappearing funds and account lock-outs. Little had changed. 

How is Coinbase dealing with it?

But Coinbase says things are getting better. In yesterday’s blog post, Casper Sorensen, VP of customer support, said the exchange has drastically reduced its backlog of customer complaints.

Since the start of the year, Sorensen said that Coinbase has reduced the number of times its active customers have contacted the company by 70%, despite increasing its total user base by 28%.

To accomplish this, Sorensen said that Coinbase has quintupled its customer support staff by hiring an extra 3,000 agents. Educating customers about how to protect their accounts from scams and recommending that wealthy customers implement two-factor verification checks also helped, he said. 

In the "coming months,” the exchange expects to launch live chat and phone support. 

By going public, the stakes have increased considerably. After all, happy customers might just add Coinbase shares to their portfolios alongside Bitcoin and Ethereum.