Bike Angels Community AMA 2023
UPDATE: This is thread is closed for new AMA questions. Feel free to add kudos to any unanswered questions! We’ll continue to monitor this thread, and of course the community is always open for membe...
Forum Discussion
I echo Timmy and ask that you look into having “dead’ or malfunctioning stations get “grayed out” or highlighted in some way. One of the most frustrating things when Angel-riding is to go to a station only to find out it’s not working. Worse yet, to dock at such a station and the ride won’t end, which requires calling customer service, etc. I should think it’s not difficult for the system to know what stations are offline or having connectivity issues. Thanks.
Yeah, that's a massive pain too. I was walking with my mom the other weekend and moved some bikes from a station that was filling too quickly (what, doesn't everybody move bikes with their mom?), and one of the stations didn't end my ride. So there I was, with my mom, asking her to wait while I go on the phone with customer service.
But the weird thing? It wasn't the first bike I'd moved to that station. The first time, the ride ended just fine. And the bikes were parked right next to each other. So, this is how I can tell it's complex. I wish it wasn't. But customer support was amazing: friendly, helpful, and they disabled the station until someone could look at it. Thanks for calling these things in when you see them.Yeah… but to echo what RickyDee said… you should have the data to know when a station is not working just via usage, or rather complete lack thereof! Or even just a dock… I’ve seen single docks not work for weeks, but the app reports a dock open at an otherwise full station. And then it’s just a stream of people stopping by the station to try to park in the one remaining open dock, that’s actually broken. My immediate thought is, why isn’t this automatic?? If a full station has an open dock that no one is using for several weeks… stop showing that dock as open! This should be easy to flag in usage data. Or if a station just stops all activity when it should be busy, grey it out. The fact that you had to call w/ your mom is a failure on the data & engineering side of things.
Yes, absolutely! The problem is actually harder to solve than it looks like from the outside, but we're working towards it. (Along with a lot of other things to make life better for riders.) This is a good idea, and I can't share more, but it's safe to say riders can expect future improvements to this experience.
Yes...but did you also get charged $85 dollars on your Visa card and have $20 worth of reward points redeemed on top of it all. I should not have to spend an hour and a half on the phone with customer service and still not feel like the issue has been resolved. I am now spending even more time documenting my concerns here....and not even bothering to worry about the missing points I have not been compensated for over the past three years.
Indeed.
Echoing and reinforcing your experience, I’ve had this happen to me at least twice (maybe more over this last year). The first time customer service was great in refunding the points/(e-bike) credits as well as the credit card. But in my most recent experience, customer service didn’t want to give me credit for all the points, because they couldn’t give me the exact amount (so they wanted to give me less). Like you say, it takes time to fix.Worse, for me, is that I sometimes am made to feel like I’m doing something wrong for asking for my hard-earned credits back, after a Citibike issue, not of my doing, costs me.
Sometimes customer service is great, but not always (always polite but sometimes unresponsive or unhelpful), and in my experience, chat is worse than phone.
Also...I just found out that Amazon points cannot be used at Whole Foods anymore...which means I have to use them on Amazon for overpriced items I do not even need or want. Is there no other option besides connecting my bank account, which I prefer not to do?
