A couple months ago I made a post here where I praised how unusually good my experiences have been with contacting Ebay for help. I cited how quick and easy it was to get someone in the correct department on the line, how eager they were to help, and how I usually got reps with excellent English fluency (both comprehending my questions and answering them). The post got a lot of replies from other sellers, I'd say roughly equal agreeing and disagreeing, but that's darn near miraculous considering the level of disagreement you would get if you praised customer service from, say, Comcast.
Well, I just had my first real stinker of an Ebay phone call, and I have to say it was down there with all-time-most-horrendous, like cable, internet, cellular and airline phone reps....yeah....THAT bad. Why? Well it was a combination of extremely complicated, urgent topic, and the worst people to handle it.
For days I've been seeing glaring issues with my seller account as shown on the page, and I'm not talking nit-picky stuff like individual fees, but the overall amounts in my invoices, payments and balances. Some days there were NO details even viewable on the screen. Today was the last straw; my "Power Seller", "Top-Rated-Seller" account was put on HOLD for supposed non-payment, and what showed on screen was even weirder numbers and dates than any prior. So I called, and the rep I got was so ill-equipped, it was impossible to tell whether it was her lack of skills in using her computer, or her English. But I will say, even without ever seeing a computer, a rep should be able to tell the difference between an either/or question and a yes/no one.
Before anyone thinks I am a bigot, I am actually a former teacher of ESL students (English as a Second Language). I KNOW that English is one of the hardest languages in the world, I KNOW the importance of speaking more slowly and enunciating more distinctly, especially on the phone, especially while we're both navigating screens. But no matter how I tried to make my questions clear, this rep kept replying with totally nonsensical phrases like, "Yes Ma'am, I understand you are concerned about that one" and then proceeding to state information having nothing to do with the ACTUAL "that one" I was talking about. It was also clear that the accounting software was just as glitchy on her end as mine, but I don't think she even understood that THAT is what I needed help with. Finally I asked for a supervisor, and what do you know, her English fluency was not much better. But at least she was (eventually) able to understand the nature of my concern, and worked out a temporary solution. I say temporary because my account is no longer on hold, but she said it could be again in a matter of days, for reasons that made no sense whatsoever.
It's like this: If you're going to maximize corporate profits by outsourcing customer service, well, congrats on being TYPICAL as opposed to great. If you're going to have software glitches that botch up accounting in the month of Christmas, congrats on following Murphy's Law. But for goodness sake, don't put your LEAST competent people on the MOST complicated and urgent service metric! Put them on feedback, returns, listings, etc.
I'm like anybody else; you mess with my money, you mess with my emotions.
