Addressing recent customer experience issues for some UK and EU users

As the most trusted brand in the crypto ecosystem, customer support is hugely important to us. But in recent weeks, our customer service has not been at the levels we expect for ourselves. We wanted to take the chance to both apologise and explain what we are doing to improve it.

Some of our customers in the United Kingdom and the EU have recently found it difficult to access their accounts, or have faced restrictions on some transactions. In some cases our customers have not been able to get these issues resolved quickly enough. This has been caused by two factors coming together at the same time.

First, over the past two months we’ve seen a sustained market rally that has brought a significant number of new customers onto our platform and re-engaged many existing customers. Second, evolving regulatory requirements mean that we have to collect additional information from some of our customers, which has meant temporary restrictions being placed on their accounts as we request that information.

We cannot compromise on our regulatory obligations, as Coinbase is committed to the highest standards of compliance. But we can do a better job in communicating requirements like this to our customers. We will also continue to develop simpler ways for customers to provide the information we need and to navigate our platform and support them when they need additional help.

Coinbase is rolling out a number of changes designed to help those impacted, and we have more on the way:

• Pending customer information requests have already been prioritized within Coinbase for resolution.
• We have also improved our customer flow on mobile, including a way for customers to see and provide any missing information through the app itself. Customers may start to receive push notifications and emails requesting additional information to remove restrictions on their accounts. (Please note that you should only update this personal information on our mobile and web applications).
• We have re-enabled a feature that allows UK customers to directly convert crypto into fiat currency (GBP/EUR) and transfer it into their Paypal accounts.
• We will soon be rolling out new solutions to reduce the time needed for customers to recover their accounts following account lock-outs.

We apologise to customers who have been impacted. We know that we can only fulfill our mission of building an open financial system for the world if we deliver a world-class service, and we will continue to work hard to do just that.

Addressing recent customer experience issues for some UK and EU users was originally published in The Coinbase Blog on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.