eBay published an interview (and video) with the head of its customer service, Steve Boehm, in which he says he’s excited about many of the upcoming changes eBay will soon roll out globally. Boehm’s actual title is Senior Vice President of Global Customer Experience, and he came to eBay in 2011 after a career in the financial services sector.
“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.”
In the video, 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.
“If you as a seller did everything you could do to make sure the item was properly represented, and actually what’s going on is the buyer is remorseful, we’re going to say the seller was not at fault,” he said.
Boehm’s area comprises customer service, billing and payments, risk and policy, and customer trust teams. “Our primary mission is to remove friction from the eBay ecosystem. Our singular focus is to make eBay easier to use, more reliable, and more consistent from the customer’s point of view.”
When asked what eBay has done over the past couple of years to improve customer service, here’s what he had to say:
“We’ve spent a lot of time and money building a coaching practice to teach our teammates how to deal with complexity while simultaneously focusing on the needs of each individual customer. We have invested heavily in technology and tools so that our people have the information they need to serve customers well. We have made a tremendous amount of progress as measured through customer satisfaction feedback, and yet we have so much more room to improve.
“But being great at customer service is about a lot more than quickly and accurately solving issues after the fact. It’s about simplifying our policies, being more transparent about actions we take and the steps customers need to take to return to trading on our platform. It is a holistic way of thinking about and designing the services and products our customers use to run their businesses on eBay, or that buyers use to shop.”
What’s also interesting is that he too referenced coming changes – “I’m really excited about a lot of the upcoming changes we’ll be sharing with our global constituency in the coming months,” he said. eBay has signaled it will make changes to the feedback system, seller performance standards, and the returns process soon – we have more on those changes here.
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