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eBay - and hal
02/07/2008 - 11:27 AM
168 (200)I've had a problem with eBay. In short I was given incorrect advice by their email support team. I acted on the advice and got a series of sellers charges that I would not have got if the advice I was given was correct.
I requested a cancelation the day after the listings went live, and then went into an email dialogue about who was right and wrong.
The listings ended and the invoice came. I didn't pay as I was still not happy, I then got payment reminders, and another set of email dialogues.
Basically I was expressing my concerns via email and I soon started to realise that my replies from Keith, Kevin, Kyle, William...and Hal were not real!!
The email replies with lines such as "We look forward to receiving your reply and helping you in any way that we can" are automated, based on keywords found in my email.
Now I have paid a hell of a lot of listings fees and generated lots of business for eBay over the seven years as an eBay customer. Yet customer support is resigned to a robot, and try if you can to find a way around this.
To me this emphasises what brilliant service we offer our members, both e2 and non paying, despite having a tiny team compared with eBay. Every single email that is submitted to us is actioned and replied to where necessary. David and Richard give personal support to members having trouble with their log in, site navigation, photo resizing etc.
eBay are not alone...more and more companies are taking on the automated route as dealing with customers and their questions seems to be coming less important.
Tags: Ebay, Frustrating, Rubbish customer support
Comments
It's getting bad Pete.....
I seem to be agreeing with you more and more!! 
e-bay especially are one of the worst, automating everything and when something goes wrong they don't have the ability to change anything in the system. Only yesterday I hit a 'pay now' button and somewhere during the transaction my connection slowed beyond a crawl, causing a timeout, prior to completing the paypal (owned by e-bay) part. On trying later, the item page said I had paid for the item, whereas my paypal account had no record of it!!! (Had to sort it manually with the vendor!)
Sometimes automation is good and does save time/money. But only to a point.....
Keep whipping those slaves....
Ian
It's difficult to even find the page you need to send them an email.
However I sent them a fake email report and had a proper reply back within 1 hour.
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