@chapeau-noir wrote:
@my-cottage-books-and-antiques wrote:
@chapeau-noir Yes, I think it is live, but there's been no actual Announcement....so people who are seeing it are largely in the dark about just what ebay is doing. An Announcement with more information would be helpful. Supposedly, the podcast will be providing more info in the coming weeks as well.
eBay has for years had serious problems with their communication, and I don't know why.
I see it as two general problems, and only one is self-inflicted.
Dealing with the general public can be a great effort with a minimal reward, and a lot of the usual processes don't scale very well to accommodate their huge user base. For example, Tech Support in my company was a handful of people, experts in their respective areas of our software products, dealing with an under-contract user base in the hundreds, which was not as bad as it sounds because on any given day, only a few customers would be calling in about something. If there was a product problem, we'd take it to Engineering (via our problem tracking system), follow up as needed, and notify the customer when a new release fix was available.
eBay, on the other hand, has a user base in the millions (give or take a bit), so a lot of the human contact you'd take for granted at other companies can't be easily supported here... especially for users with complicated problems or, ah, less-than-capable problem-solving abilities or communication skills. We here in the Community groups can choose to ignore posts that are simply rants, clueless, or just plain incoherent for whatever reason, whereas eBay Customer Support has to deal with every person who contacts them. No wonder they're trying to bring AI chats up to speed instead.
So that problem of theirs is at least partly due to their own success, being too big to easily support their user base. (It doesn't help that they have way too much reliance on cheap and undertrained CS staff.) But the second part is entirely of their own creation: a near-zero level of communication between eBay employees and the outside world.
By "communication" I mean actual two-way dialogue, and I'm also including intra-company communication as well. It's all very well to sit and listen to a podcast between two or more department heads, but when one says "We'll have an announcement tomorrow about it," and tomorrow comes and goes with no announcement, and no one else seems to have any idea about it either, that's a problem. Our Community contacts here will cheerfully refer problem reports to this team or that team, but they seem to never hear anything back in reply, certainly nothing quick in terms of an acknowledgement (e.g. "Thanks, we have reproduced the problem, and are working on it as ALERT12345.")
Similarly, if something does get fixed, no one ever gets an update about it. The fix or change is eventually discovered by someone here. Customer Service has no idea. No one from the Engineering side posts anything about it.
New changes or enhancements also go unannounced. They're sometimes described as a "test," but the results of the test are never discussed. Again, no one saw the changes coming, and no one from the group who instigated the changes wants to talk about them. They're just... there... for some users... and then maybe they're not... or they come and go depending on whether you cleared cookies 'n' cache... but (as I have said several times in the past) there's never anyone stepping forward to say, "I'm the project manager, and here's why we made this change, and here's why we think it's a good idea." No one within eBay seems to want to take responsibility for anything, and as a result the bad ideas stick around as long as the good ones; there is no effective way of pushing back against the bad decisions, or having any kind of meaningful dialogue about how they could be improved.
For example, the Feedback pages were recently changed to offer what was called "Most Relevant" ordering as an alternative to the usual Most Recent. However, there was no clear explanation of what the code thought was most "relevant" about this comment vs. that comment, and, adding insult to injury, the Most Relevant setting was hard-wired as the default choice, requiring users to switch back to Most Recent every single time they needed that ordering restored. No one has come forward to defend their design, or even to explain why they are not able to code the ordering choice as a sticky value that will be saved for the user.
That clampdown on communication between eBay employees and the outside world is not helpful for either side. It leads to the sort of coding chaos that occurs whenever eBay tries to change something that ends up breaking seven other things. A lot of us out here are coding, QA and testing professionals who would be more than happy to lend our expertise, but eBay seems determined to blunder on in their own unfocused way.
