Let’s talk about communicating

June 28, 2008

old Bakelite phone
Creative Commons License photo credit: aussiegall

If there was a theme to this year’s eBay Live, it was “talk to us”. “We want your feedback.” “We could have done a better job of communication; we’ll try harder in the future.” “We crave information about what people think.” (John Donahoe, Brian Burke and Jamie Ianonne respectively) By the time that Ryan stood up in the PowerSeller Panel to tell us about his innovations for Customer Service, and in particular about some changes which should match eBay customers with agents who can answer their question the first time, without multiple irrelevent cut and paste emails beforehand, eBay was sounding like a company that had really changed: I thought they not only wanted to speak to their customers, but they were busy figuring out just how to do that.

By coincidence, that same day, I received an email from a PowerSeller (who we’ll call Mike). He wrote

I have been suspended from eBay, for apparently breaching their sellers policy of over 5% customer dissatisfaction!

I have been a loyal and trusted e-bayer for over 4 years with 1340 positives and just 3 negatives (one of which has now been resolved) with an average feedback % of 99.6 !!

Despite numerous e-mails back and forth I have not been able to resolve the problem, or indeed find out exactly how I have breached their policy.

I took a look over the account and unless there are some PayPal issues he’s not telling me about, I don’t see why Mike’s been suspended. But more importantly, I don’t see why eBay haven’t told him why he’s been suspended.

As eBay take steps to clean up the site, most sellers who lose their accounts are going to know exactly why that’s happened: but some, the dolphins, the “edge-cases”, are not going to understand. If eBay are going to suspend selling accounts for a neg or two, or a small handful of neutrals or 1s and 2s on DSRs, they need to be prepared to deal with that properly: they need to explain to sellers exactly what the problem is, and what they need to do to rectify it. We need out-bound customer service calls, not just for those with account managers, but for everyone. And if they are going to put people on a month’s warning, that too needs to be followed up with a phone call, explaining you’ve had too many PayPal complaints, or your DSRs have slipped badly. eBay need to communicate when we need to communicate, not just when it suits them.

Someone, somewhere at eBay is now reading this and shaking their head and asking if I know how many CS agents that would take. No, of course I don’t because I don’t know how many sellers you’ve suspended. But I would respectfully suggest that if it is more sellers than half a dozen agents could deal with in a week, then you’ve suspended too many people. In your rush to do the right thing, you’ve caught up too many innocent sellers in your net. Change the criteria. Get rid of the really bad people first, and then you can look again at your edge-cases and see if they’re really deserving of suspension, or if they just had a bad month last month.

This morning, I had another email from Mike, telling me that his account had been reinstated. Good news, but he still didn’t know why he’d been suspended. Though eBay support had phoned him, they “were totally unprepared to give any explanation as to their actions and flatly refused to discuss the matter any further”.

eBay’s upper management say that they are committed to communicating better with their members. They ask us to let them prove that. But they seem to have a problem themselves communicating this to the rest of their staff, who act in the same Kafkaesque arbitrary way, totally failing to communicate with the ordinary users whose livelihoods are being put at risk by these policies.

Yes, eBay talk a lot about communicating, but where they really need to start doing it, is amongst themselves.

Written by Sue Bailey · Filed Under Featured, News | 28 Comments