@a_c_green wrote:
@tunicaslot wrote:
I use to attend chat regularly - but have found that most of the questions asked aren't getting answered. I'm in no way blaming the blues as I think they do the best with what they have to work with - but they pass things along and weeks later - we still don't see an answer.
It was concerning today to read that a question asked 2 weeks ago about how small sellers can piggy back on the July 15th crash sale still didn't have an answer. The sale is the 15th 5 days away - so any advice should have been given today at the latest.
I feel bad for the blues as no one seems to want to provide them with answers for the community they interact with.
I'm sensing the same thing. Our own customer support people at my job had the authority to contact anyone necessary within our company in order to get answers to customer questions, and basically to act as a customer advocate within the company. Conversely, eBay contact people seem to get shut out and ignored more often than not, which is not their fault, but does hamper a lot of forward progress.
For example, back at the beginning of May, a revised Shipping label confirmation email came out which had lost virtually all its data, following a rather clueless revamping by a programmer who clearly had no idea what he was doing (e.g. the supposed link to the PayPal label payment instead brings up a Send Money to eBay window) and no guidance on what he was supposed to convey in the generated email.
It was reported in excruciating detail in the Weekly Chat on May 22 (here), followed two weeks later by a request for an update, which was promptly acknowledged (here), but has produced nothing of substance since then. Needless to say, the Shipping notification email remains as useless for recordkeeping today as it was when first pushed out back at the beginning of May. We are now approaching the middle of July.
Someone at eBay needs to go into Engineering and start knocking heads together, but I don't get the impression that the front-line first responders have any authority to push things along.
From working with many eBay departments significantly over the last couple years... the sad truth isn't that they "don't have the authority to contact who is necessary".
It's simply that eBay does not even have a department established to handle those questions or issues.
I was told straight up that the tech team and catalog teams are outsourced, and various CSR's have expressed discontent as all they could do is email them. That's the only communication anyone at eBay has with those teams, they use their internal software to email them. I actually have some emails that show the full format/communications between them. Aside from some flags triggered by their software, it's a simple email message.
I've also heard discontent where representatives in Utah have found legitimate issues, included videos and screenshots in the report of the problem, and the tech team rejects the case saying they "don't see any problems"...
Even on here, it took several days for a rep to find information about how basics on how search works, and the information they provided was not only inaccurate, taking 5 minutes of searching shows that the reality is far different from the information the CSR was given.
I met with some eBay managers in January, and when questioned on what they can do to help us, my answer was simple: "We need someone to go to for help, because we've been told too many times that eBay doesn't have a department or team to help with the issues we found".
So the last time, I surpassed CSR's and was connected to one of the Motors Sr. Managers. He reviewed our account and said he couldn't find any issues and wishes he had more information for us, and the best advice he had was to "check the community forum".
Apparently forum members are more knowledgeable than anyone at eBay.
Even Senior Management is not able to find out information about how eBay works, they simply don't have anyone in charge of these things. The most important jobs are outsourced... Meaning the only people who really understand what is going on are not in communication with the core eBay team or eBay management.
And if you have any experience with those teams, you know there's sometimes 6+ months before they even respond. Last time we worked with the Catalog team, CSR reps opened cases for us since we had no responses, we ended up having 4 cases open for over 6 months and absolutely no updates or responses on any of them. It took several weeks of contacting CS daily before they were able to get a response from the team... and then they processed the update we needed incorrectly. And it took weeks more before they did things properly.
mam98031 • Volunteer Community Member • Buyer/Seller since 1999
