Diagnose and Respond to a 50% Rise in Customer Support Tickets at Coinbase

You are a product manager at Coinbase. You notice that customer support tickets have gone up by 50%. Explain what you would do: how you would work out what is driving the increase, which problems you would tackle first, and how you would respond and confirm that the response worked. ```hint Rate before root cause Before looking for a broken feature, check that the jump is real, and ask whether it still holds once you account for how many people were using and trading on the platform during the same period. ``` ### Clarifying Questions - Over what period did tickets rise by 50%, compared with which baseline (the previous week, the previous month, the same period last year), and was it a sudden jump or a steady climb? - Did active users, new sign-ups or trading volume change over the same period, for example during a sharp move in crypto prices? - Are the extra tickets concentrated in particular contact reasons, such as account access, identity verification, delayed deposits or withdrawals, or trade problems, or are they spread evenly? - Did anything change on our side around the same time: an app release, a new verification or compliance requirement, a fee change, or a change to the help center or contact form? ### What a Strong Answer Covers - Validating the ticket count and converting it into a contact rate before treating it as a product problem. - Segmenting the increase by contact reason, user group, platform and timing to localize the cause. - Ordered internal and external hypotheses that fit a crypto exchange, each paired with the evidence that would confirm or rule it out. - Triage that puts account-security and money-movement issues ahead of raw volume, with both short-term relief and lasting fixes. - Metrics that show the response worked, with guardrails so tickets are not cut simply by making support harder to reach. ### Follow-up Questions - Most of the new tickets come from users saying their withdrawals are taking longer than usual. How do you narrow it down from there? - The support team wants to hire more agents right away. When would you agree, and when would you push for something else first? - Total volume returns to normal, but the share of tickets about unauthorized account access stays elevated. What do you do?