Let me state to begin with:
I don’t think Ebay is a trash-bin company. It is fairly evident, however, that their
senior management is significantly lacking in intelligence. Or it may be that their intelligence is aimed
in the wrong direction.
Most senior management, of virtually any company, seems to
forget that if your customers are happy, you make money. Conversely, if your customers are not happy
with you, you won’t make much money.
Although it is right and true that companies are in business to make
money, you have to question the prevailing attitude that management should
scramble desperately after every rolling penny.
‘Leaning’ a company (taking out the waste) is a praiseworthy
endeavor, but focus should be correct.
Companies examine their processes, look to where they can cut
workers. At no point do they look at their
management structure to see how efficient that is. Management is expensive and it produces no
product. Senior management is even more
expensive.
Before I get too far off point, the one area where massive
mistakes have been made by virtually all companies is Customer Service.
Despite the drooling lemming-like behavior exhibited by most
people when confronted with marketing, Customer Service is the company’s actual
face turned toward the customer. This is
what the customer remembers rather than the emails he keeps hitting delete
about. Let’s face it, after years of
marketing, people pretty much have figured out that they are being lied
to. It doesn’t take too many shoddy
products to make a customer depart. Most
companies seem to believe that while they will lose a few customers, there are
many more out there to deceive and make money from. Unfortunately for that type of mental
deficiency, the pool of the unwary grows smaller every day, mostly due to the
internet. Eventually everyone on earth will
know how to search for ‘Your company name+problems’.
Unfortunately Ebay has areas where it exhibits great
idiocy. Fortunately they’re not like
AT&T and actually have instituted changes that help their customers, rather
helping themselves to their customer’s wallets.
For example, making shipping easier by interfacing directly to UPS,
USPS, etc and especially their global shipping program, actually helps
sellers. Their fee structure, however,
which increases the cost of shipping and assures that small sellers subsidize
the large sellers, unfairly burdens buyers and small sellers.
One area where Ebay has bought into idiocy is Customer
Service. Virtually all companies believe
(at the present time) that Customer Service is a money-sink and must be
reduced. To have people on the phone
helping customers without generating revenue, seems to be a losing proposition. This relates to how managers think too
short. While customer service does not
directly generate revenue, a good customer service ‘face’ will generate more
customers and maintain repeat customers.
However, most management is not that diligent to dig into the numbers to
find that out. Management likes to look
busy, but they abhor deep thought and hard work.
Ebay does its part to reduce customer service expenses by
making it difficult to get answers.
While they do have an extensive online help, if you have a question
about something more complicated than ‘How do I leave feedback?’ or ‘How do I
end a listing?’, you won’t find it. An
expedient thing to do would be to update your online help every time a question
gets answered by your customer service.
This would eventually build a pretty comprehensive database. There is no evidence that Ebay has even
thought of this.
This was the situation I was in. I sold an item and had listed it as being
shipped by UPS. The customer only had a
P.O.Box address. I know enough to
realize that UPS can’t ship to P.O.Boxes, so I began to look for ways to change
the shipping method. If I ship by USPS,
I remain on Ebay and get a small discount.
If I ship by UPS, I am sent to the Paypal site. In my mind this has had to have happened
before, so I searched Ebay help. The
search on Ebay help leaves a lot to be desired.
I was presented with a list of items that were not even close. Now I have a dilemma. To get a discount on final value fees and
listing fees, I’m supposed to ship within one day of payment. Ebay has forums, but forums are a hit-or-miss
affair. You wait to see if someone
answers you and if you can trust their answer.
With only one day to deal with, I needed an answer now. So I jumped through the hoops to contact Ebay
Customer Support by phone. Ebay has
modified the phone contact so that you don’t have to search and find a subject
before they allow you to get a customer support ticket number and phone
number. I get my number and call and I
get through quickly. Having to punch in
a 7 or 8 digit ticket number is a bit of a hassle, but at least the voice
response system is only one layer deep.
I get to a Customer Support Representative quickly and state
my case. He’s eager to help me, listens
to everything I say and tries. The
problem is a) He is either untrained on how to search his expert system or b)
the expert system is not complete. He
has to run off to ask the question. The
problem is, and I found this out later, he gives me the wrong answer. He tells me there is no way to change the shipping
method and the only thing I can do is to go directly to the USPS site to
ship. This is what this solution does
for me: First I have to go to the USPS
site and enter all the information. Then
I pay a higher price. Then I have to go
back to Ebay and enter the tracking information. If I could stay on the Ebay site, all
information would already be there, they would forward the tracking information
and all I’d have to do is print the label.
I tell him I realize it’s not his fault, but thanks for
nothing. I do tell him to inform someone
that this type of situation can arise where shippers have to be changed. I know why Ebay makes it impossible to change
shippers. They believe they are saving
the buyer from being switched to a cheaper, longer time shipment by
unscrupulous sellers. The main problem
here is the most unscrupulous sellers are the big guys that Ebay panders
to. If you don’t believe me, look for
the sellers with the most ridiculously high shipping rates and you’ll find that
they are big sellers.
Now, in case you did not know, Ebay and Paypal are the same
company. They are joined like Siamese
twins. And here is where I found the
information I was given was wrong. I
went to ship the item to see if there was somewhere else I could change
shippers. I was transferred to the
Paypal site and after logging in, I easily found a drop-down box where I could
change from UPS to USPS. While I was
embarrassed at my own stupidity, I was more irritated that Ebay could not tell
me that information.
Why couldn’t the Ebay customer service representative tell
me this small piece of information? It
really comes down, again, to bad management.
If the customer service rep had not gone off to ask a question, I would
have attributed it to just one rep who might have forgotten. However, now having dealt with not just first
line, but the second reference line, I can probably state that some senior
manager somewhere decided to save money by making sure the customer service
people only received minimal training.
There will always be problem employees. Too many of them. However, management should be bright enough
not to blame employees as a knee-jerk reaction.
Ninety percent of the problems I have seen in business have been the
direct result of bad management decisions.
One of the best quotes I’ve ever heard, and this was from a minister, is
that ‘Thinking should be the loudest sound in your business.’
Now imagine what the boardroom of AT&T sounds like. You can take it from there.
