Hi emailswarup,
Your point on Contact us link being difficult to use is well taken. I agree that it might be difficult for a new member to find Contact Us link. This is something that we are looking at. However, I am unable to agree with your suggestion on making discussion forums a secondary avenue for Customer Support. Following is our rationale for restricting discussion forums to user to user and eBay interaction and not customer support:
Discussion Forums are a great way for ebay users to interact with each other and find faster/practical solution to their issues. It also gives an avenue for our users to directly interact with eBay team and give frank feedback on site and improvement areas. I feel this is a unique feature, for in very few businesses do users get an opportunity to discuss their experiences in an open, transparent forum, and to voice their concerns directly to the management team members.
You might feel that the above features can be maintained, even while helping new users with Customer Support, however, experience has taught us differently. In Baazee, there was a feature called cafรฉ, which was similar to Discussion forums. At that time, as a matter of policy, any customer support related issue on the forum was responded by Customer Support. Over time, as users realised that they were getting service on posting on discussion forums, they started to post on cafรฉ itself, without writing to Customer Support at all. Most Baazee users used to call cafรฉ a โwailing wallโ - a place that was frequented only by a user who had an issue or Customer Support people. Hence, over time, the original purpose of the forums was lost.
Having said the above, I think it is critical to help a user who has any issue or dissatisfaction with their eBay transaction. For the above, ebay is taking the following steps:
- Live chat link is being promoted on all Home Pages, so that users can get faster service.
- Customer Support is constantly trying to improve the quality of the response a user receives. (I hope our users would have seen an improvement in quality over the past months.)
- Contact Us link has been improved to make it more user friendly. We will continue to monitor usage of Contact Us link and make it more user friendly.
I hope the above has helped you understand the reasons behind the policy of not responding to user specific complaints on Discussion forums. As and when we receive any suggestion on improvement of eBay feature, the same is passed on to the relevant team for consideration and action.
Regards,
Sapana