On eBay support response time: the good and the bad

On Friday, I wrote about a bug with My eBay that had been kicking around for over a week. It was a pretty serious issue where My eBay was showing that you had no sales… even if you really had. Shortly after I posted my article, I got a message from eBay’s Andy Chase who sometimes reads my blog. He was just as worried about the bug as I was and had passed it on to make sure it was taken care of.

And, huge credit to Andy, he got the job done. Literally hours after I posted my article, the My eBay issue was fixed. That’s the kind of attention to sellers I like to see!

I am very grateful to Andy and everyone he put on the case for taking care of that so swiftly but I also have to play devil’s advocate for a minute. Because there are thousands of eBay sellers. There is no way I’m the only seller that noticed that issue. There is also no way I’m the only one that reported it.

Is it good for my ego that I can get something fixed quickly with one blog post? Sure. But what does it say about the eBay customer support system that there are probably hundreds of other sellers that emailed, web chatted and called about this issue and got no response. Why were all those other complaints caught up in the pipeline for over a week with no movement on this issue? Why did a take my blog post for someone to actually get this fixed? What was the bottleneck?

I don’t have an answer. This may just be a squeaky wheel kind of thing where it became a higher priority only when I sort of put them on the spot by calling it out publicly. But I also wonder if the people who can make things happen (like Andy) aren’t hearing about this stuff like they should. Where is the problem? Are the CS reps poo pooing issues? Are their managers hiding the issues they get from the reps for some reason? Are the seller not explaining the issues well so no one really understands the problem? Are memos to higher ups not getting read? Is the eBay customer support contact system what’s to blame?

And, this is the one I really get stuck on, don’t eBay employees use their own service? Shouldn’t someone at eBay HQ have noticed this long before the rest of us did?

Obviously, I have no clue how eBay works internally but this whole experience has made me wonder about this. Writing a blog post about the issue was an effective way of dealing with the issue but… should it be?

Let’s talk a bit about eBay bugs past and present. How effective have you found eBay support in dealing with site issues? What’s been your most effective method getting them to address bugs and other problems? What do you think is the issue with their current customer support chain?