Ebay's automated help system . . .

[mrcoffeee]

Hi, the last three days I have had three very minor problems with Ebay but enough to have to contact live help, how many of you know where I'm going with this already? LOL, I bet A LOT OF YOU, anyway, there are six very limited help topics which do not include most of the problems you might need live help with. You cannot get live help unless you pretend your problem is included in one of those six topics. I'm retired IT with more than 20 years into it, I know how to fix their problems, If I could stroll into their IT department in person and have a seat at one of their terminals I could fix the issues in ten minutes, but I'm retired so I've been in contact with Ebay requesting they fix the limitations of the system, super easy, There are two main problems one is the categories of help choices do not cover every problem and 2 if you can get into a chat getting a live agent for some thing not included in those six choices is impossible. So you have to lie, well if you lie you get the wrong department automatically. Not a formula for success. So My suggestions to fix the issues are add two more categories of help problems and one tweak to the chat bot. Two categories need to be added, maybe more but these are needed desperately: first categories to add: 1) Technical help (or website help) and 2) Everything else   If you ckeck box one for tech help you get a help desk employee in the IT department, and if you check box 2) Everything else you get a switchboard operator who is trained to identify and understand the problem as efficiently as possible and then route you to another employee's extension who can help, and then make sure they're connected before abandoning you. Then the tweak to their chat bot, I know if you've ever tried to get a live agent with a problem outside of the six choices you feel me on this, You can't get a live agent all while being told "you can also speak to a live agent any time" You can type the word Agent one hundred times in a row and get nowhere. Typing "911" gets the box up quicker for "speak to a live agent" but be warned if you click it you're sent to choose which of those six  topics your problem falls under again, and basically resets you back to the start. My proposed tweak would add an "agent counter" to the chat box, if a customer has to type "agent" over and over again and get nowhere the fifth time they type it the counter pops and rings up a live "everything else" help desk agent. Now look, this didn't come to me because I'm special it's probably come to the minds of hundreds of thousands of people. I just happen to be trained an certified in the answer that's needed. So What I need you to do is copy and paste this in an email to Ebay somehow. Just keep sending over and over and over, I now have their attention I think and it's gonna take a little pressure to tip the scales but we're there at that point. If they suddenly start getting bombarded with emails and letters saying "this guy's fixes need to be implemented immediately!!! I've been talking to their help teams for three days in a row now, the last guy sent me a link to apply for their IT department, I'm 59 now, my working days are over. But my ability to fix problems never ends. So join me, Make Ebay Great Again!!! LOL If you've ever faced that help system with a problem not listed I know I can count on you to send TEN emails with this attached lol, GO FOR IT, ENJOY, the worst case scenario is it doesn't change, but Wow if they fixed it that could usher in a new age for Ebay . . . I always try to make everything better for everyone and I do it all for free . . . Cheers       :O)

[albertabrightalberta]

I have no clue what you are asking (if you're asking for help) because your huge block of text is impossible to read, difficult to follow and your comments are all over the place. 

Please break your post into paragraphs. 

Thank you.

[eburtonlab]

You may be better off asking your question here to get suggestions from experienced users.

To contact eBay, use the chat assistant to request a chat with an agent or a call back by starting on the Help & Contact page and following the links for your issue.

What options you see may depend on your particular issue and how busy that department is at the moment.

Try entering "agent" into the chat window. You may have to provide some context to reach the correct department. If you see a "Still need help?" or "More options" choice, either of those should lead to a call back option.

If nothing else works, try this link between 5am to 9:30pm Pacific Time:

https://www.ebay.com/help/eua?id=5275&mkevt=1&mkpid

[zrminid · Accepted solution]

I think one of the points the OP is trying to make is that the chat help system seems to be broken. I can't access it either for a problem I'm having starting a return. Not at all acceptable.

[bishftl_collectibles]

neither of those links work.   cant chat or request callback

[eburtonlab]

neither of those links work. cant chat or request callback

What browser are you using? Latest version?

Any difference if you try another browser?

[mrcoffeee]

please try to understand this point, you wrote: "and following the links for your issue."  There are six choices you can choose for your problem; links, find me anything relating to the tech side of Ebay, there are no choices therefore you can't move forward in the flow chart, there is no forward for any tech problems with the website itself. Go have a look, Pretend your "My Messages" link won't do anything , and come back here and post the flow chart you would follow to get live help, because you have not even tried what I already told you what the issue was. You're just spouting off the system message word for word

, thank you for your time. There are six topics and 99% of what people MIGHT need help with are not included in those six topics, Find me tech support in these six topics: Tell me whic one matches the problem? NONE OF THEM DO, NONE OF THEM COME ANYWHERE NEAR THE PROBLEM I'M HAVING. Here are ALL your choices Chief, There are six on the Ebay help page, but they are all paired, so in the PROGRAMMING there are actually only three choices; Give me your so perfect and simple solution again with your help path, thank you : 

Contact us

What can we help you with today? Please select one.

SellingBuying

AccountShipping and tracking

Returns and refundsFees and billing

[mrcoffeee]

My solution to all of this is simple and would be IDEAL for everyone on both sides to STREAMLINE Ebays Automated help and make it WAY MORE EFFECTIVE. It's funny the one response the only person who understood the issue wasn't one of you support people it was the guy that said "I think what the original poster is saying is. . . " because he is facing the exact same issue with the automated system, his problem doesn't fall into any of the categories you can request help in, SO: My solution: Add two help choices two more links and every freakin problem a person could possibly face would have a corresponding help choice. Looking at your resources for the answer is already a hard miss because it's just not covered by the help choices, nobody besides myself and anyone who has been through the help system for something not covered will understand. As a RETIRED MICROSOFT IT TECH, I UNDERSTAND THE IMPORTANCE OF RECREATING THE ISSUE BEFORE RESPONDING. A Lot of you experts do not have that yet . . . but you weren't trained to deal with Customers in the field for twenty years like I was so you DO get some slack for that from me. If you haven't tried to recreate the problem to help you understand COMPLETELY THE ISSUE then you don't completely understand the issue. I have some skills I was trained very heavily for and I was the top in my field. I'm certified by Canon to work on any copier or network Equipment from 1988 to 2010, and I'm Certified by Microsoft on Windows 98, Windows XP and 7 and the corresponding NT products. 

     So Here's what I DID: I contacted Microsoft, got my old tech account updated and signed up to certify and train on everything Windows 10, Defender and any course they have relating to these products. After that I looked at the Ebay employment link your last Customer support Agent sent me. I do not want to work again, but my wife became disabled with Congestive Heart Failure last year I may not have a choice, so I checked out a few jobs and decided to apply for an IT Consulting position. Started that process, needed to upload a Resume. So I went to WinWay Resume, a Company I first worked with in 1992, explained my situation and they sent me the free link to install their latest product and all upgrades and unlocks. Now I have my resume program together, am signed up for hours and hours of New Microsoft training and certifications. Ebay has no tech side support, NONE ZERO ZIP NADA. I realized very quickly in this process that my system problems are probably because I am so highly trained and have been into the registry changing entries for almost a decade and probably screwed up my computer somewhere along the way. I am having a lot of weird little problems lately. To fix my problems, my repair path includes completely refreshing my PC, installing a brand new Drive C: for the operating system, right now my Drive C: is my music drive and nothing else (which you advanced people will know can cause problems) and for years I have had to force, adapt and change programs so they would look to drive F: as the system drive instead of Drive C: Well, the latest troubleshooting software from several different places only looks for system files on Drive C: I finally realized, instead of forcing my system to bend and strain to my  will, maybe I should just get a new SSD and a new copy of Windows 10 and start fresh, put the operating system on Drive C: like it should be and then add everything back in. Ebay had some very helpful people who were unequipped with the tools to help because the problem was not anticipated to ever happen. 

      OK, Those two additional links would be "Ebay Technical Problems" with a help desk employee stationed in the IT department to handle those issues and the final category for help (if you look, 99% of companies have this or something similar in their help process): "Everything Else" Which goes to a help desk operator who is trained to listen and identify the department that can help, and coordinate with that department to assist the customer with those problems that fall into none of the other seven categories. SUPER SIMPLE. Several Ebay Help techs really like these suggestions and this is why the one employee sent me the link to apply for that Ebay IT consultant position

[mrcoffeee]

apparently you're the only one having these issues. If you have to have three spaces starting a sentence every few sentences or can't understand any of it without that, kinda sounds like a you problem to me, every English speaking person I know could understand that perfectly even without three or four indented sentences added now and then. Can you understand single sentences ok?

[mrcoffeee]

One day a customer asked for help. He used poor paragraph structure. Some someone jumps up and raises their hand " I CAN HELP I CAN HELP!!!!!      Proceeds to do nothing but criticize the requestors grammar. This is a TEXT world now champ, you need to adapt. People Say Sus, do you criticize them for using words that are not words? Do you have trouble understand sentences if they aren't capitalized or punctuated properly? Then you belong in 1985 when everyone was on that page. Times have changed my friend. Today you might see people write chopped up words with numbers in them, misspells all over the place, made up strings of characters that look like words. You have to get used to all of this, it's only getting worse. But for reading comprehension, I'm trying to find courses on how to understand poorly grammatically structured English . . . turns out I can't find any, apparently nobody else has this problem . . . Next time though, if you can't understand a post because there are missing spaces in it, just go on to one you understand . . . 

[mrcoffeee]

Thank you, I have been through all of that dozens of times. I finally came to the reasoning that some of my problems are buried in my own operating system and registry in fact I will be the first to admit as a power user I have altered so many system settings I undoubtedly created some of my own problems. Once I reached that point I just ordered a new SSD and made plans to completely gut and renew my Workstation, go back to Microsoft and get new training and certification on all Windows 10 products, and move my old Windows XP IT training into the 21st Century. So that I can just fix everything myself again. In this process Ebay gave me a jobs link and I may have a line on an IT Consulting job with Ebay. I'm retired an on the fence about going back into the workforce but its a remote job and I have everything I need to do it. Once I'm confident my system is back in prime condition I doubt any of the problems I've been having will be there but if they are I will address them at that point. I like that you put an answer out there to help. You and a couple other people. I'm still mad about the one person who answer and all they did was criticize my lack of paragraph structure saying they couldn't understand anything I wrote. You can see what I wrote back to them, maybe not very nice, I didn't come here to make friends I came here to make Ebay's Automated help system better. Don't try to make friends y criticizing my paragraph structure. If someone doesn't have any suggestions they would have been better off keeping it zipped . . . But thank you for offering what you know. I've been though the process at least 30 times already. My topic is just not included in the Choices they give for automated help. And Any company's automated help needs to cover every problem not six cherry picked problems and ignore everything else . . . that's my thing, Cover all the possible topics, add two more help categories: Ebay Site Help, or Ebay Technical Help, and a Switchboard operator choice for "Anything Else". That would instantly cover everything just like that. Your Everything else switchboard operator would be trained especially to understand what department is in charge of the problem a user is facing and get them to that department, the tech help would have a help desk Employee inside the IT department, he would have all the technical answers because of his IT training. If Ebay could implement this they would quickly bring their automated help system up to 2024 standards. As an IT tech, I know most companies already have help desk employees for "everything else" type help choices. Ebay needs to join them . . .

[mrcoffeee]

Force my problem "ebay link not working" into those categories and tell me how you did it

[mrcoffeee]

I'm using Chrome, there's no excuse for problems on Chrome, I have Firefox but Dude, why would you write a program that works on Firefox and not Chrome??? You know? I'm not trying firefox, and I'm not using any other alternate browsers Chrome is the browser I use it's the most widely used browser of them all and you (ebay) just need to make your stuff work on Chrome. Now in the modern times if I have to download a new browser what comes with it? piggybacked antivirus I will never be able to remove from my system for the rest of eternity? Most likely yes I will get that, so I'm just not going that option, I already accidentally got McAffee trying to fix this issue and it's preparing to be annihilated as soon as I can get a grip on my old IT skills enough to overpower/outthink it. I have HATED MCAFFEE FOR FORTY YEARS!!!!! MOST INVASIVE AND DESTRUCTIVE PROTECTION PROGRAM ON THE MARKET THAT I'VE EVER ENCOUNTERED, and always has been. The solution I came up with is I ordered a new SSD for a clean install of Windows 10, start from there, reconfigure my system to make it more standardized, right now my system drive is Drive F and my music storage drive is drive C, that has and continues to create problems. So the plan is, fresh start, new Drive C with the operating system on it, music becomes Drive M (for music lol) my oldest hard drive and last mechanical drive becomes an external drive, and I know my system will perform better than it ever has and be RIGHT again. Sometimes it's just time, especially when you tweak settings in the depths I go to tweak settings. At least one time a day my browser window for no reason will close, reopen and ask if I want to restore my previous session. Since I tried deleting the McAffee "my system administrator" (which is set for me, I have all the available administrator permissions enabled for my main account) "has blocked some program features which won't allow the program to run" The box pops up about five times at five minute intervals after I reboot my PC, then stops but pretty annoying, so I have deeper issues than Ebay, I decided to fix those properly and start there . . . Thank you again

[mrcoffeee]

basically having accepted that I have somewhere along the line corrupted my operating system, I decided to start by fixing that first

[mrcoffeee]

so funny how all the experts aren't getting it and you ARE GETTING it, that is the problem in a nutshell lol, thanks for posting this it justifies my stance