eBay India is an online market place which enables trade on a local, national and international basis. The Indian branch is located in Mumbai but its main head quarter is in San Jose, California.
With ecommerce booming in India, e-commerce services has become common place and consumers are getting more comfortable purchasing online. Especially books, electronics goods and apparels categories are more popular items to be sold online. With competitions like Flipkart, Myntra and Amazon India; eBay India is certainly aggressive in its effort in India.
Considering that its an e-commerce platform and its business is transactional, the customer support plays an important role. Our own research on the complaints around e-commerce brands showed concerns around delay in delivery, over pricing, bad packaging, quality of the products and bad customer service.
eBay India has an impressive presence on Facebook and Twitter. On Facebook, eBay has 2.9Millions likes and on Twitter it has 40.7K followers. eBay India certainly seems to be using both the channels as their customer service, where they are responding to customer queries and concerns. But on Facebook page, the brand has disabled the COMMENT on wall feature preventing any customers to post any queries.
But ebay India has integrated their customer service feedback form with the Facebook, as a separate app where customers can raise their issues. This techquie is not enough for customers who are used to just posting their queries or mentioning brands on their timeline.
Lets get into details of how they are responding to customer queries and complaints on social media.
Element 1 – Tone of Messaging
Besides the promotional contents and campaigns related engagement, eBay India are using repeatitive formal tones to assist their concerns on Twitter and Facebook. Though in Facebook, there is hardly any customer service related commmunication. Most complaints on Facebook are redirected towards their eBay For You facebook app.
Element 2 – Are they sending canned responses, without understanding the context?
eBay India is certainly using canned responses because many of their communication are very similar to each other. Most of these first responses are formal request for the Paisapay ID which eBay India uses to associate the customer ID. Hence if you make any complaints on Twitter, that’s the first thing which you need to share with eBay India. There are certain examples of miss-communication as a result of these canned response where customers is not satified with the way his case has been handeled.
Element 3 – Turnaround Time
Apparently on Facebook page, as the Wall comment is disabled there is no response on the User posts. But the turn around time of eBay on the complaints is more than 17 hrs which is not a good response time. Though they actively engage with the posts related to the campaign, they do ignore the complaints on their posts and there is also chance that the community manager might be deleting or hiding the user complaints on posts.
On Twitter, however they have a very slow response time of average 5 hours. Considering the number of transactions which happens on their site, they are expected to have much faster responses.
Element 4 – Is brand sending personalized replies?
In all of their engagement on Twitter, the customer support team is using Twitter_Handle to address the customers. Beside this, there is no mention of the name of the customers. As the overall tone is very formal, eBay India hardly addresses their customer through their name or send personalized message or any casual follow up. Instead of this, eBay India is using application like twitlonger to send case related messages.
Element 5 – Is brand following up on the complaints?
There is no follow up communication on Twitter regarding the case. It could be that most of the communication is taken offline, hence no engagement related to follow up on case. But some examples indicate that it could be that eBay India is not really following up with the customer case and they are left unattended.
Element 6 – Is brand answering to all the queries?
There are examples on Twitter where the customer complaints remain unattened. Though eBay India seems to be responding to most queries, there are lot of issues in the responses and lack of proper communication as a result of repetitive formal canned replies.
Element 7 – Is the brand present on major complaint forums?
Mouthshut.com which is one of the biggest online complaint forums has about 449 complaints about eBay India alone, but none of the complaints/queries seems to have been responded. Considering the active engagement on Twitter and Facebook, eBay India should also try to address customer’s complaint on other major forums too.
Unlike on social media sites, forums provides customers to provide more details about the issues. Hence eBay India can easily reach out to the customer by using those information. As most issues could be handled offline, using these platform to drop a follow up message would be great way to show that issues are being resolved.
Further, they seem to have an active profile on consumercomplaints.in but the engagement on the site is very low.
The status of most of the complaints on the site has “complaints being notified to customer support of eBay India”. But it seems that there is no strong follow up from the eBay India’s customer support team. There are responses from eBay India account on some complaints but again its not consistent across all the complaints.
Element 8 – Is brand sending duplicate replies?
There is no such issue as duplicate replies, but there are lots of monotonus same replies on every complaints and even during the follow back on the complaints. It sounds almost robotic and automated.
Overall the social customer service team of eBay India is not very impressive. There are lots of issues with the authenticity of their customer support team and their responses. Further, Facebook page is not willing to engage with customer through their standard response to fill in the form to get access to customer support.
eBay India is an online market place which enables trade on a local, national and international basis. The Indian branch is located in Mumbai but its main head quarter is in San Jose, California.
With ecommerce booming in India, e-commerce services has become common place and consumers are getting more comfortable purchasing online. Especially books, electronics goods and apparels categories are more popular items to be sold online. With competitions like Flipkart, Myntra and Amazon India; eBay India is certainly aggressive in its effort in India.
Considering that its an e-commerce platform and its business is transactional, the customer support plays an important role. Our own research on the complaints around e-commerce brands showed concerns around delay in delivery, over pricing, bad packaging, quality of the products and bad customer service.
eBay India has an impressive presence on Facebook and Twitter. On Facebook, eBay has 2.9Millions likes and on Twitter it has 40.7K followers. eBay India certainly seems to be using both the channels as their customer service, where they are responding to customer queries and concerns. But on Facebook page, the brand has disabled the COMMENT on wall feature preventing any customers to post any queries.
But ebay India has integrated their customer service feedback form with the Facebook, as a separate app where customers can raise their issues. This techquie is not enough for customers who are used to just posting their queries or mentioning brands on their timeline.
Lets get into details of how they are responding to customer queries and complaints on social media.
Element 1 – Tone of Messaging
Besides the promotional contents and campaigns related engagement, eBay India are using repeatitive formal tones to assist their concerns on Twitter and Facebook. Though in Facebook, there is hardly any customer service related commmunication. Most complaints on Facebook are redirected towards their eBay For You facebook app.
Element 2 – Are they sending canned responses, without understanding the context?
eBay India is certainly using canned responses because many of their communication are very similar to each other. Most of these first responses are formal request for the Paisapay ID which eBay India uses to associate the customer ID. Hence if you make any complaints on Twitter, that’s the first thing which you need to share with eBay India. There are certain examples of miss-communication as a result of these canned response where customers is not satified with the way his case has been handeled.
Element 3 – Turnaround Time
Apparently on Facebook page, as the Wall comment is disabled there is no response on the User posts. But the turn around time of eBay on the complaints is more than 17 hrs which is not a good response time. Though they actively engage with the posts related to the campaign, they do ignore the complaints on their posts and there is also chance that the community manager might be deleting or hiding the user complaints on posts.
On Twitter, however they have a very slow response time of average 5 hours. Considering the number of transactions which happens on their site, they are expected to have much faster responses.
Element 4 – Is brand sending personalized replies?
In all of their engagement on Twitter, the customer support team is using Twitter_Handle to address the customers. Beside this, there is no mention of the name of the customers. As the overall tone is very formal, eBay India hardly addresses their customer through their name or send personalized message or any casual follow up. Instead of this, eBay India is using application like twitlonger to send case related messages.
Element 5 – Is brand following up on the complaints?
There is no follow up communication on Twitter regarding the case. It could be that most of the communication is taken offline, hence no engagement related to follow up on case. But some examples indicate that it could be that eBay India is not really following up with the customer case and they are left unattended.
Element 6 – Is brand answering to all the queries?
There are examples on Twitter where the customer complaints remain unattened. Though eBay India seems to be responding to most queries, there are lot of issues in the responses and lack of proper communication as a result of repetitive formal canned replies.
Element 7 – Is the brand present on major complaint forums?
Mouthshut.com which is one of the biggest online complaint forums has about 449 complaints about eBay India alone, but none of the complaints/queries seems to have been responded. Considering the active engagement on Twitter and Facebook, eBay India should also try to address customer’s complaint on other major forums too.
Unlike on social media sites, forums provides customers to provide more details about the issues. Hence eBay India can easily reach out to the customer by using those information. As most issues could be handled offline, using these platform to drop a follow up message would be great way to show that issues are being resolved.
Further, they seem to have an active profile on consumercomplaints.in but the engagement on the site is very low.
The status of most of the complaints on the site has “complaints being notified to customer support of eBay India”. But it seems that there is no strong follow up from the eBay India’s customer support team. There are responses from eBay India account on some complaints but again its not consistent across all the complaints.
Element 8 – Is brand sending duplicate replies?
There is no such issue as duplicate replies, but there are lots of monotonus same replies on every complaints and even during the follow back on the complaints. It sounds almost robotic and automated.
Overall the social customer service team of eBay India is not very impressive. There are lots of issues with the authenticity of their customer support team and their responses. Further, Facebook page is not willing to engage with customer through their standard response to fill in the form to get access to customer support.