Here is what I would do... I would take him up on his offer (personal attention from the CEO? Sure!), but I would ask him whether he'd be willing to pick 3 or 4 other customers who had _NOT_ written an article which had gone viral and offer THEM the same deal.
I want this to be true. I want PayPal to believe that this behavior is harmful to their business and to push (at ALL levels of the company) to change how they treat their customers. But I won't give them the benefit of the doubt based on one message from the CEO. They burned their second chances long ago, and it's much harder to regain my trust after losing it. I hope that they do.
Ooh! Ooh! Pick me! Pick me! I had 20K removed from my account without an explanation and even hired a lawyer, all of which went absolutely nowhere.
This is all a bunch of baloney. If PayPal was really serious about fixing all the pain and misery they caused, they would create a direct line of communication where those on the other end were empowered to resolve all problems ... instead of giving a curt "send us a letter".
Until PayPal starts working with their customers and stops treating them like criminals, I'll take my business elsewhere.
How do you think a mechanism like that gets created?
Do it in one go and you're talking a department of tens or hundreds of people, most of them newly hired. Turn them loose without careful thought and at the very least you create massive chaos in your organization. But you also probably create substantial losses as fraudsters use the chaos to take a lot of money.
I think the only way you can get to the customer service experience you want is by starting with one customer's problems, solving them, and then changing the organization a bit so it's less dumb. Then you rinse and repeat for years.
It's an organization of thousands of people across the globe, with a zillion lines of code and, a ton of procedures and habits, and a lot of institutional inertia. The way to solve it is by starting now in a manageable way, and that's what he claims he's doing.
I want this to be true. I want PayPal to believe that this behavior is harmful to their business and to push (at ALL levels of the company) to change how they treat their customers. But I won't give them the benefit of the doubt based on one message from the CEO. They burned their second chances long ago, and it's much harder to regain my trust after losing it. I hope that they do.