Uber is changing things up on the customer support front.
Tim Collins, who joined in early 2015 to lead the ride-hailing company’s global customer support efforts, is no longer with the company, according to a report from tech news site Recode and confirmed to Coins2Day by Uber. Collins is headed back to Amazon, where he spent 17 years prior to his time at Uber.
Austin Geidt, Uber’s fourth employee and until now its head of global expansion, will take over Collins’ responsibilities in the interim, the company confirmed.
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It’s unclear why Collins has decided to leave (and whether it was his decision), but the move comes only months after a pair of scathing reports from BuzzFeed about some of the company’s customer support practices.
For one, BuzzFeed published screenshots of Uber’s internal customer service software displaying more than 6,000 results when searching for the subject line “sexual assault” among customer inquiries, and 5,827 with the subject line “rape.” At the time, Uber responded that its software’s search functionality returns many additional results because of names and words that begin with with the letters R, A, P, E consecutively. It also said that it has received only five claims of rape and “fewer than” 170 claims of sexual assault between December 2012 and August 2015.
BuzzFeed also reported that Uber had recently reorganized its customer support teams and moved part of its operations to other countries like the Philippines and India, leading to a drop in quality, according to the report. At the time, Uber countered by saying that it had always planned to expand its customer support operations to other countries and that it was not “offshoring” them.
More recently, Uber’s customer support practices also came under fire after a shooter in Kalamazoo, Mich. Killed several people on an evening he also worked for Uber. At least one victim was killed during his driving shift. One of the shooter’s passengers reported him to both the police and Uber because he was driving erratically four hours before the first victim was killed, though Uber didn’t immediately suspend his account because the complaint didn’t explicitly mention violence—only his driving.
“We thank Tim for his leadership in building out our global support teams and infrastructure,” an Uber spokesman told Coins2Day.
The story has been updated to clarify that Austin Geidt’s role leading the customer support team will be temporary.
