Language and literacy skills of Ebay Customer reps

[bettyboopsadaisy]

I'll start by saying for the past 30 years I have been an English as a Second Language teacher and as a result have developed an great understanding and tolerance for the difficulties and challenges faced by new English speakers in their workplace and in general.

For that reason I don't feel it is fair to either ebay customer reps or ebay sellers and buyers that those who are supposed to be assisting us with emails responses when we contact customer support have such poor Engllish language and literacy skills as to make their responses to our questions often almost incomprehensible.

In many cases its clear that they either don't understand what we are asking or haven't acquired enough English to respond appropriately or grammatically, making the whole exercise of asking for help pointless.

This leads to me wonder why ebay can't bring itself to spend some of what must be its HUGE profits on providing their reps with a  training support program that will equip them better linguistically to do the job they do !!

[kustomizer99]

One problem is, they don't understand the nuances of Australian turns of phrase. But it's worse than that, as many of them can barely understand English at all.

[retailtherapist_8]

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@ausgeoff1946 wrote:

I guess this is a common problem when phoning customer support with most major companies these days—Australian businesses are off-shoring their call centres to Mumbai or Manila.

These reps work from multiple script sheets.  The sheets run in order across their carrel wall.  As your question becomes more detailed, they simply move to the next sheet in the progression.  Although they (may) speak English acceptably, they actually have no idea of the technicalities of your issues.

Which is why their answers sometimes bear little relationship to your question(s).

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I wouldn't be suprised if  some of them start actually bringing them back to OZ. My friend is an executive with  a large Australian bank. Since they took their call centre off shore they have had nothing but complaints and problems. Customers are taking thier problems into the branch as they refuse to deal with a foreign customer help dept. Not so cost effective anymore .

[the_billycan]

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@retailtherapist_8 wrote:

I wouldn't be suprised if  some of them start actually bringing them back to OZ. My friend is an executive with  a large Australian bank. Since they took their call centre off shore they have had nothing but complaints and problems. Customers are taking thier problems into the branch as they refuse to deal with a foreign customer help dept. Not so cost effective anymore .

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That pre-supposes that eBay cares about their customer's issues. They plainly don't or else they would never have moved "customer help" off-shore. I can guarantee you that they will never be returning to Australia. eBay doesn't have branches so there is no incentive there. 

[*crikey*mate*]

I don't think that you can say that eBay don't care about their customers, but you could say they are invested in minimizing the costs required to provide customer service.

I believe that eBay are developing these Trading Forums into a "free" customer service option. We're being groomed to be the customer support and we do it for free.

A few quotes from Lithium

"social support

Empower social customers to help each other, improve customer satisfaction and save millions in customer support costs."

"Conversations become knowledge assets which deflect thousands of service requests and generate enormous cost savings."

[the_billycan]

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@my*mum wrote:

I don't think that you can say that eBay don't care about their customers, but you could say they are invested in minimizing the costs required to provide customer service.

I believe that eBay are developing these Trading Forums into a "free" customer service option. We're being groomed to be the customer support and we do it for free.

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I think you just proved my statement. If they (eBay) were concerned for their customers, they wouldn't provide this as the only outlet for support, by Australians for Australians, when so many of the answers provided here are inaccurate, biased or just plain rude.

It is unfortunate that the overseas call centre operators do not have a grasp of the Australian idiom but no responsible executive could justfiably believe they would. As it stands, one has a choice between someone who can barely speak the language and zero knowledge of the local procedures or someone who only has a passing understanding of the eBay/Paypal/Australia Post rules as they may pertain to a specific user's issue but probably don't, but will answer anyway, apparently to inflate their post count. 

[*crikey*mate*]

When was the last time that you had a rep who knew the rules?

One of the last time I spoke to an eBay supervisor about my listings appearing inbetween accounts, they told me to contact the tech team at LIVEWORLD (this was a month or two ago). When I called them on it, they reassured me that they had the most up to date info in front of them.

Besides which, Lithium moderators "value my contributions", so much so that they tell me so frequently - the last time they even included a smiley!

[the_billycan]

I can't remember the last time I had a rep that knew the language and I find it particularly difficult to understand the Filipino accent, even my sister-in law. Hard to assess their knowledge of the rules. It comes down to a matter of trust, I guess. When an ebay rep assures me of something, experience has taught me that they may not even be aware that they are in error, including whether their information is up to date. Perhaps, if eBay had run a purely transparent operation without going to the extremes they do to cover up for the bad behavior on the part of some sellers and buyers, I would feel differently.

I find it amusing that you assumed that I was referring to you when I mentioned inflated post counts. There are one or two others I have had issue with in the past for their absolute pro-eBay stance beyond all reason. You were not one of them. Perhaps you think I am mistaken in that belief.

[davewil1964]

Would you also advocate eBay spending some of the money on enhancing members' skills in language and literacy.

There are many members, purportedly from Australia, who would make a call centre staffer blush.

Since a knowledge of language usage seems to no longer be a requirement to pass even English at an Australian school, how can anybody criticise those who have never been to this country, yet have a better knowledge?