Human CS No Longer Offered on either eBay or FB?
Well, I guess I'm not surprised. It appears to me that human CS is no longer available as of Mar 1st.
Can anyone verify this?
26 comments
Well, I guess I'm not surprised. It appears to me that human CS is no longer available as of Mar 1st.
Can anyone verify this?
onefootflipper
·6 months agoHonestly, email is far more efficient way for a company to handle problems that someone in a call center.
That call center employee cannot be an expert on everything, not even close. With an email it can eventually get routed to the actual correct person instead of the call center employee saying whatever they can to get you off the phone.
I still don't know what all you people are wanting to talk to ebay about on the phone all the time. Do you just want to chat? Not able to read or search? I don't get it. I couldn't imagine every contacting customer service over anything that didn't require a human being to manually override something. Which has happened to me one time in 28 years, and I think I did it through the chat.
simba6
·6 months agoThat is unfair. They always check to see if robots are logging in. If they can be robots, it's only fair we can be too.
lawnmowerpartsstore2
·6 months agoThe world is changing FAST !!!!!!
stainlessenginecovers
·6 months ago@pls-consignments your title states 'FB' which would be Facebook which is still alive and well, as well as there is NO GOOD REASON to EVER contact 'ebay direct' where you'll get an AI bot or an offshore 3rd party rep that can do nothing.
So, FB is the way to go and I believe they were cutting off 'outside USA' only.
jbbowers12012
·6 months agoHi Everyone, Quite Frankly, given the efficiency of this board - How often is the eBay CS really needed? Jus' Sayin'.
dhbookds
·6 months agoemail is probably "human"............ wasn't facebook always email? Frankly, I'd rather email than trying to work thru accents.......
valueaddedresource
·6 months ago@dhbookds I wouldn't bet on this.
CEO Jamie Iannone told investors in 2024 that AI was "fundamentally changing the pace of innovation" at the company and gave reading and writing responses to support emails as a prime example:
"eBay deals with a lot of customer support between buyers and sellers. And that customer agent sometimes had to read like a 12 paragraph email where somebody explained it, we would hire someone to read that."
"Now we have AI read that email, write the initial response. So it's fundamentally changing our pace of how we work and the pace of innovation."
In the ~2 years since that statement, eBay's financial reports have shown many millions of dollars being spent specifically on AI and other technology to "enhance the customer experience" while hiring for roles with titles like Senior Director, CX (Customer Experience) Engineering to "leverage AI to redefine our customer journey, simultaneously achieving a new global standard for hyper-personalized and proactive customer interactions."
Last week's layoffs also affected a number of the higher level support people in Utah and while some of those jobs may go to overseas call centers, the off-shoring is also likely taking the form of devs and engineers at the new R&D center in India creating and implementing more "self-service" support options to replace the human support.
@pls-consignments may not be correct that human support is gone completely, but eBay has not hidden the fact that they are intentionally routing more support through AI/automation to cut costs and drive efficiency and the downstream effect of that is that individual users will increasingly have a tougher time getting through to a human when navigating the purposely labyrinthine design of the eBay customer support experience.
pls-consignments
OP6 months agoWell, ,according to the comments, it appears that it could be dependent upon the issue, as well as the time of day. Thank you to everyone for your help!
a_c_green
·6 months agoJust curious: how did you get that detail about the human contacts being unavailable as of March 1 specifically?
pls-consignments
OP6 months ago@a_c_green
It just so happens that I began trying to connect to an agent on Mar 1st. The last time I talked to a human was the beginning of Feb. I was able to use the email feature, but I can't stand the canned responses.
12345jamesstamps
·6 months agoEven if you got a 'human CS' they can't do anything.
Heck, I tried calling my 'big' bank last week about an eBay problem and got put on hold for 20 minutes and gave up.
I went in person to my bank and problem got solved.
I made 3 purchases from 3 different sellers and for some reason they each cost $1.08.
My bank put a block on my credit card...even after I OK'ed the last charge of $1.08 through a text by my bank on my iPhone.
bonanza125
·6 months agoYou go through chatbox and then have you call them back. I did this just yesterday cause I had a question. So human customer service is still up and running. Don't believe everything you read. Make sure it's being announced by Ebay. Yes Announcements are still up and running as well. Go to your seller hub bottom left corner. "Selling Announcements"
pls-consignments
OP6 months agoWell, now that's interesting. Can I ask what the subject was? Perhaps, there are certain issues where it's still available?
momtoabeautifuldaughter
·6 months agoI talked to a human CS on Monday........it was a return case where item hadn't even shipped out yet...
inhawaii
·6 months agoMy last few contacts with ebay have been through "let us call you back".
jbbowers12012
·6 months agoWe have also used the "call Back" - But the last time was a few months ago.
dhbookds
·6 months agoWhere did you see this?
I still see this using ebay help
pls-consignments
OP6 months agoOh yes, have seen this as well. HOWEVER, the "Contact Us" part of this feature is ONLY email. This is what I see. If anyone sees anything different, please share.
kibble-net
·6 months agoI didn't get any announcement about this. You should still be able to request a phone call from the chatbot.
pls-consignments
OP6 months ago"Announcement"? Sorry, but eBay stopped doing that years ago. And no, you can no longer request call back by an agent. I've personally tried every avenue starting Mar 1st. All correspondence is now via email, which makes sense for eBay's evolving business model since emails can easily be integrated into autonomous responses by AI.
stuff4divas
·6 months ago@pls-consignments i just clicked on the ? and eventually get this>
and when i click on it, i get the chat box
pls-consignments
OP6 months agoYes, the "we'll connect you with an agent" is email only.
stuff4divas
·6 months ago@pls-consignments oh wow! that's not good bc of lag time. Posh and Merc have been doing email only for some time now and they take forever to respond and lots of times they don't answer the topic of concern properly 🙄
as far as their social media, from what i read from a few moderators, the changes you mention were for international eBayers, not US based eBay accounts
stuff4divas
·6 months ago@pls-consignments here is a convo from a fb post
https://community.ebay.com/t5/Selling/eBay-getting-rid-of-eBay-on-Facebook/td-p/35435880
a_c_green
·6 months agoMy understanding has been that the chat box always comes up first, and then after some batting around back and forth, the chatbot will eventually let you request a callback from a live person.
Has there been any statement or other official cite to say that the human reps are no longer used? (Granted, the offshore reps were pretty useless anyway, but removing them altogether seems like it should be a bit more newsworthy.)
stainlessenginecovers
·6 months agoI think regarding FB; that was in other countries but not US??