PayPal president makes house-call (or email) to smooth over customer dispute

Today, we offer you a happy story about getting your funds locked down in PayPal. No, seriously.

According to All Things D, David Marcus, PayPal’s new president, is stepping in where his customers service fails. He sent out a personal e-mail to Build Conference creator Andy McMillan after the distraught PayPal user nearly lost $62,000 when two of his accounts were locked down. After many attempts to get on the phone with customer service, he finally consulted the Twitterverse and received a call from PayPal the next day, informing him that his funds went bye-bye and he wouldn’t get access to his account.

That’s a pretty big bummer when there are tens of thousands of dollars involved.

Marcus then stepped in with this letter:

Andy — the team will reach out between now and Monday, and they will lift all holds/limitations, and release all of your funds. If anything, please know that I’m not going to use your story to radically change how we deal with holds, and communicate with our customers. I’m driving a lot of changes at PayPal (I took over 5 months ago), and I hope that over time we will earn your turst again. Not with words, but with delightful products, and amazing service.

If you believe in this, I’d like to enroll you to help me out. I’d like you to keep accepting PayPal for payments, and now that you have a direct channel with me, give me feedback so I can get it directly from the outside. If you accept to do this (I would completely understand if by now you wouldn’t want to deal with PayPal ever again), you have my commitment that I’ll look after you account personally, and ensure this will never happen to you again. Again — would completely understand if you didn’t want to do this. I’m just trying to leverage the issues you went through to radically change our approach, and fix this for all of our customers for good.

Please confirm when you have access to your funds again so I know you’re good on that front. And again, don’t hesitate to contact me anytime. You now have my mobile number.

Have a great weekend.

David.

Sent from my iPad

I had to include that last part.

PayPal tapped Marcus to become president in March. He was previously the vice president of mobile, who released PayPal’s “Here” product, a competitor to Square. At the launch he told VentureBeat that PayPal is looking to change a lot of things, including the fact that design isn’t associated with the name PayPal.

“When you think about PayPal two years ago, the first thing you think about is not design. We want to change that,” he told VentureBeat at the time. “We want to go down to the last little pixel and make sure the UI is perfect.”

Even if this was a PR stunt — which it may not have been — Marcus obviously wants “good customer service” to be associated with his company. What president wouldn’t?

via All Things D; hat tip The Next Web; David Marcus image via Robert Scoble/Flickr