What Questions Would You Ask the Head of eBay Customer Service?

by: Owen

When are you going to leave so someone competent can take your place?

by: JQ

The level of service I have received from Ebay over the last few years has been absolutely hideous. Rage inducing hideous. AT&T level hideous. I have seen Ebay's customer service ranked as among the 10 worst in all corporate America in two separate polls.

As recently as 2012 I considered the service at Ebay to be completely acceptable.

I noticed that Steve Boehm was hired in 2012. He has overseen the disaster.

If Ebay is serious about improving customer service the first step they need to take is completely obvious, fire Boehm.

The second step, terminate their contract with the Filipino company to which they have outsourced most of the phone customer service. On a very consistent basis I have found employees of this company to be surprisingly unprofessional, poorly trained, frequently dishonest, and often difficult to communicate with due to their less than full command of English.

by: pace306

I call BS!

NOTHING about eBays process is FAIR .. except to eBay since they make money on the process.

I have a question - why do you think that sellers who have yrs of experience are automatically thieves - why wont you call out your bad buyers?

by: aim04744

I cant. I am still speechless at the thought of anything being fair. Or competent.

by: Ric

Mr Boehm is yet another outsider who thinks he understands the seller side of eBay transactions yet remains clueless due to his lack of hands on experience selling under the policies he has helped develop and implement.

Contacting eBay customer service and being able to deal with a well informed seasoned agent is virtually impossible.

Wait times to speak with agents are horrendous and intolerable.

Policies are written so that they need to be interpreted and outcomes decided by individuals who also have zero experience buying or selling on eBay. Worse still is the fact that when multiple contacts are made, outcomes differ from one contact to the next.

The policies at eBay are stacked against the seller so much that sellers abandon eBay rather than continue trying to work with a company that starts with the belief the seller is at fault and ends at the same place virtually every time.

eBay has over promised buyers, and they force sellers to bear the losses associated with eBay's defective and ill conceived  policies.

It is almost comical that before eBay began inserting themselves so deeply in the buyer - seller relationship,  sales across the platform were healthy and growing.  Somehow, eBay's so called management team is unable to recognize, or unwilling to admit that the company's efforts have unilaterally destroyed both buyer and seller confidence resulting in sales growth rates that are approaching negative figures.

eBay's constant assertions related to buyer protections paints with a wide brush and the result has been declining trust in all eBay sellers by buyers and the cost associated with this failure has been eBay's decline in popularity.  

The downward slope eBay now finds itself riding is one that they chose to build. As steep as that slope is, there is little chance of impeding the momentum that they themselves erected.

by: Bloggo

Where do these morons come from?

by: Ming the Merciless

I's ask him nothing because the answers would be ebafia-evasive or LIES.

BOYCOTT SAN JOSE!

by: Saintsteven

I would ask anyone at eBay who might listen: what would you do to dismantle the Us vs. Them culture that has evolved there?  Why can't they build a model that rewards buyer/seller cooperation?  If they don't like "friction" (and who does?), why do they foster it?

by: Moonwishes

when I read Steve's statements of what was happening or happened or would happen on ebay, all I could see was a bunch of words with no substance behind them. Completely un-measurable 'goals', no substance for knowing how they are going to go about this. It was like he was stumbling around in the dark trying to say something that sounds 'good'  and trying to have people think he really cared about what goes on there. I assume he is just another highly overpaid bigwig that doesn't have a clue and doesn't care. Otherwise his talking points would have been clear concise and measurable.

by: Ihatethebay

Dumbass Feebay bozos continue to think of the buyer as the customer, when in fact, it is we sellers who are the true customer.

The buyer is the customer of the seller.

Get it, Mr. We-Neg????

by: Go tell the Spartans

I'd ask him where he's been hiding since he started with eBay. "Boehm says there are a lot of instances where the buyer or seller walks away from an eBay dispute resolution and not feel happy. "We may be doing the right thing, but they may not be happy." But, he said, eBay aims for fairness, not happiness."

This clown is clueless - he has no idea what fairness is let alone apply if. eBay suborns fraud and then blames the seller. If the seller screams loud enough he recovers his money, but is sold that this was a one time customer appreciation move - seriously?

by: Whatever

I'd ask them to bring back customer service to the USA. Listen - I'm quite sure some of those international reps are lovely people. Their polite for the most part. However I just don't understand 1/2 of them - and most of the time I can't even hear them. AND they rarely handle the problem without transferring me 4 or 5 times and never back to the USA when I can understand the person speaking. I'm sure ebay feels they are saving money paying lower wages but for me the end result is often hating ebay.

by: toypixie

Why are so many of your CSRs based in foreign countries? These CSRs are VERY hard to understand and often do not have accurate information. I'd also like to understand the process behind deciding which accounts are "high risk" as my new business eBay account - linked to an eBay account that's over a decade old that has excellent ratings - was suspended for being "high risk" with no explanation as to what made it high risk and with no option for appeal.

by: AuctionMonkey

I would ask...
WHY DO YOU HATE US! AAAAHHHHHHHH!

by: mindelec

what would i ask him...

"who EXACTLY do you think are your customers?"

"how much ebay selling experience is required for your position?"
(yes i know the answer, i'd ask it just to see him squirm, lol)

by: foothill

''Steve Boehm, in which he says he's excited about many of the upcoming changes eBay.''

Here we are again ... excited!!!
for the next attack,abuse on sellers.

by: Massachusets Howler

There are no questions to ask.
MH

by: The End

Title of article linked to this blog :
"Head of eBay Customer Service Says Don't Expect Happiness"
Excerpt :
"At eBay, one of the biggest challenges we face is the complexity of our environment, with over 800 million listings and 155 million buyers around the world," he said. "It's a very complicated marketplace, with eBay sitting in the center."

To begin with it's a 5 to 1 ratio of items to buyers. This is NOT RELEVANT.

That Ebay (Steve Boehm) sees itself as "sitting in the center" is a GRAVE MISTAKE.

Boehm does not have a handle on Ebay's purpose, any more than Suzy Deering, who refuses to recognize that Ebay's customers are THE SELLERS.

Throw back Both of these clueless misfits and START OVER.

Ebay : RUDDERLESS. Over reaching. Government tool. USELESS.

by: The End

I will add :
The ONLY CHALLENGE Ebay faces is making sure they have enough servers and tech crew to handle the flow of transactions.
Ebay : should recognize it is ONLY THE UNDERCURRENT making sellers successful.
Steve and Suzy : (Biff & Chloe) Get off your high horses. You're attitudes are KILLING EBAY.

by: Rexford

There is no point in asking eBay management anything, because there are none so deaf as those who will not hear.  Voice-of-the-customer is completely foreign to them. Great management works as a business partner with it's customer. Management at eBay doesn't have a clue about this.

Look at where most of eBay management came from.  What they know about actually selling on eBay would fill a thimble.