Coinbase has attracted a new top executive to help boost its customer support department as the company struggles to keep pace with major growth. Coinbase is the leading U.S. digital currency marketplace and has experienced a bumpy streak of customer service issues with outages and slow response times as the main complaints of its expanding user base.
Coinbase’s latest appointment aims to bring experienced talent to the company. In Tina Bhatnagar, former vice president of operations and user services at Twitter, the company has found its new VP of Operations and Technology.
“Tina will lead all operational teams related to Coinbase and GDAX customers,” said Coinbase CEO and cofounder, Brian Armstrong. “She will ensure we meet our commitments to double the size of our support team over the next three months and expand 24/7 phone support to all customers by Q2 2018,” Armstrong wrote in a blog post detailing the politics of growth of the San Francisco based company.
Coinbase is currently valued at $1.6 billion and has boosted its user base to 13 million. This is a major increase from 5 million in 2016. For Bhatnagar, this number and a fast growth pace, are not uncommon. During her time at Twitter, she served a community of 330 million monthly active users on average.
“When deciding to join Coinbase, I was not blind to the challenges ahead of me,” wrote Bhatnagar for the Coinbase announcement. “But when I met Brian and the team, I knew it would be a truly joint effort to run our customer operations how we envisioned it. It’s an exciting time, with Coinbase and crypto in the public eye more than ever before, but that also means it’s an even more critical moment to stake our position. And this can only happen if we do right by our customers every single day.”
Coinbase has 200 employees and faces a new stage of consolidation, with plans to open an office in Manhattan. The company has pledged to create local support teams in regions where it operates. In the coming year, for example, they’ll set up a support team in Europe.
