Outrageous incompetence abounds in eBay Support

[pwhpatr]

After days of misinformation, lies and general incompetence I discover that all my problems could have been solved by:

1) A proper error message on the site

2) One of the 3 support staff or 2 supervisors I spoke to actually having a basic knowledge of how their own site works.

Someone should be fired for how poorly trained the support staff is. I would start with the supervisor who accidentally hung up on me while trying to transfer me to PayPal.

[brandeentertainment]

The boards is the best place to get info ... The customer support via Phone is VERY POOR...

If a supervisor accidently hung up on you as annoying as that is it was an accident ... If people were fired for things so small the world would be in a lot of trouble LOL

It is good you took note that ebay upper management is responsible instead of pointing out individuals just taking a job to make ends meat...

Cheers and good luck

[pjcdn2005]

If a supervisor accidently hung up on you as annoying as that is it was an accident .

Actually I've heard of that happening numerous times...to many to be considered an accident.

[kalvin@ebay.com]

These stories greatly concern me - please drop me an email with the details of the concern(s) & we'll make sure things get a thorough look.

Thanks,

[kxeron]

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@pjcdn2005 wrote:

If a supervisor accidently hung up on you as annoying as that is it was an accident .

Actually I've heard of that happening numerous times...to many to be considered an accident.

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Some phone systems are really touchy and can lose calls in hold or on transfer (to the point some calls on hold can become "lost"), but I agree if this is happening this often there should be an investigation as to why.

Though, from my perspective (I don't have eyes in eBay as a company) is that there seems to be too many different teams in eBay's corporate structure, GSP specialists, customer support specialists, technical support, management etc, etc and no information being freely available between teams without calling in a member of those teams.

This results in situations where one team isn't adequately prepared to handle issues. To keep call times down (as in callcentres high resolution times is often marked as poor performance), the reps of many companies are instructed to disclaim there's anything that can be done about problems that affect not that many people. So I think with these hangups/issues with phone support, the issue may not be the employees, but the procedures that outline performance that create those performance metrics that management uses in deciding who is a successful callcentre worker and who isn't.

These metric issues combined with the fact there needs to be so much collaboration can result in it being often undesirable for callcentre workers to put someone on hold to practically have to hold meetings with 1-2 other people about the issue meanwhile the timer is still clicking.

As far as the supervisors, likely they may be inundated with work as it stands and are trying to shrug off these sorts of calls that can't be resolved without reaching out to other teams.

An internal wiki can often be useful to mitigate these sorts of issues where all employees who have customer contact can use and post information to be available regardless of what department one is in, this way if there's an issue with a paypal error message, all an employee has to do is search the wiki using keywords and get an answer as to what's going on. No "reaching out" needed.