An update on improving our customer experience

The following is the latest update in our series of blog posts describing our commitment to improving our customer experience.

Coinbase has taken the following steps to support an increased volume of customer support requests following the increased demand in crypto over the last few months:

• We quadrupled our support staff since mid-late November. We’ve added approximately 2,000 people to our support team in the past few months, increasing the team by a factor of 4, and by the end of April it will increase by a factor of 6. We’ll continue growing our support team to meet customer demand.
• We’re improving self service within the product itself, so that our customers are able to resolve issues on their own. Since rolling these out at the beginning of the year, we’ve already reduced the rate of customer support requests per user in half. And our teams across the product organization are continuing to improve the product experiences to relieve key customer issues.
• We’re adding live support via messaging in the second half of 2021. We’re a 24–7 business. Our customers are online and expect us to engage with them online. But many customer issues take some time to research and resolve, which results in a poor customer experience by phone. Messaging will offer the best of both worlds — live support without having to wait on hold.

We take extensive security measures to ensure your account remains as safe as possible. We are proud that our customers have never lost funds due to a security breach of our platform. We also educate customers on best practices for securing their accounts. While Coinbase itself has never been hacked, customers may experience email account takeovers, SIM swaps, third party password or breaches of their personally identifiable information that are unrelated to Coinbase. With access to a customer’s email address and other personal information, hackers may gain access to their accounts, including, in some rare instances (.004% of the time to Coinbase customers in the last year) their Coinbase account.

In some instances when we encounter unusual activity, we may be obliged to temporarily freeze a customer’s account. This is to protect customers from withdrawing their funds until we have completed a review. For example, this could happen when we suspect a customer is violating our terms of service, or when we need more information to meet evolving “know your customer” requirements in a certain jurisdiction. In addition, customers may voluntarily freeze their account if they suspect suspicious activity has occurred.

When this happens, we strive to get customers back into their accounts as quickly as it is safe to do so. However, as a rule, we always prioritize security over accessibility. A very small number of customers may face wait times to reassess their accounts while we’ve ensured the security of their accounts. These situations are rare and certainly not the typical customer experience.

We want to thank our customers for their patience and for always providing feedback on our product. We will continue to work every day to improve the product and customer experience, and will continue to provide updates on our progress going forward.

An update on improving our customer experience was originally published in The Coinbase Blog on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.