eBay Reviews in Vancouver, BC Area

Pros

Well, there is no good reason other then the benefits.

Cons

Management needs to learn how to practice what they preach to the employess. Show some respect and dont treat us like we're in High School.

Advice to Senior Management

Treat us like Humans... and Keep it Human with us.

Pros

Great environment, second job in which I feel like part of something bigger. My input is taken into account thanks to a great supervisor, the information is getting to the right people and the right managemtn. Great benefits and the treatment of employees is outstanding.

Cons

Sometims it can be strict by the book, which means that is some few issues there is no flexibility.

Advice to Senior Management

Listen to the community, eBay is not abalance community at the moment, buyers at taking advantage of the sellers and seller are taking it agaisnt eBay and eBay employees.

Pros

I get paid pretty well for the work i do. There are definitely benefits that you don't see in the industry in Vancouver. Things like free pop, bagel day and little things like that. It is more in line with .com companies in silicon valley. Our medical, dental and vision benefits are also pretty good. Inline with others or a bit above the average.

Cons

Career advancement is tough due to the high number of employees, resulting in high competition. The support given to the CSRs sometimes is lacking. For a technology company, it doesn't invest quite enough in technology to help CSRs support the community.

Advice to Senior Management

Listen to your front line reps more.

Pros

The compensation was fair for the job. The benefits were rather good as well. The actual co-workers were also, for the most part, a solid group of people with whom I was honoured to work. Plus, it looks pretty good to have "eBay" on a resumé.

Cons

I left during the time of Meg. Talking with my friends who are still at eBay (although that is fewer and fewer people as time goes on) and reading the comments that other people have left here, I got out at the right time.

Much of my time with the company was good, but even during my few years, customer service went downhill markedly. At first, only a few things were outsourced (mainly very basic customer service email questions), and the outsourcing companies were still in Canada. As time went on, more and more things were outsourced - more complex customer service emails, Live Chat, International questions, selling tool questions, image service questions, etc. Mumbai and the Philippines got more and more of the workload, and the quality loss was apparent. Emails could be routed for weeks between service partners, answers often had tangential or no relationship to the questions asked, and the unhappiness of the customers was obvious for anyone to see.

The niggling over metrics also increased remarkably. People were fired for missing productivity metrics by 1 or 2 percent (quite literally). The productivity metrics increased by leaps and bounds. If you got a bad quality review which was not in fact an error on your part, too bad so sad - the process to overturn a bad quality review was to appeal it to the quality team. And since the quality team was penalized for having quality review overturned, as you can imagine, reversals of quality reviews almost never happened. And customer satisfaction? You were ranked on both your satisfaction and eBay's satisfaction, so if the site was down or some feature wasn't working, that was a strike against you.

Management's decisions also became more divorced from reality as time went on. eBay Express was a wonderful example of that. No one wanted Amazon Lite, but we were going to get it anyway, come hell or high water. Meanwhile, real innovation went the way of the dodo.

Now that Meg is gone, the decisions have just gotten worse and worse. Getting rid of Helpline was one of the dumbest customer service decisions ever made by eBay. You had a group of people with a massive knowledge base of eBay centralized in one location, ready to give support to anyone from Mumbai to the top of the customer service chain, and you threw them to the wind. The logic fails me on that decision.

Advice to Senior Management

Listen to your customer service team. Just listen. And use the site. It'll probably help you stop making decisions that are so foreign to what eBay is. Finally, write a question into eBay support and see how long it takes for it to get resolved.

Pros

4% RRSP employer contribution; excellent benefit packages such as 100% dental coverage and $250 vision care per 2 calendar year; company stock purchase plan and options (although it's been underwater ever since); well known reputation - "eBay"; free pops, juices and water bottles and bagel day; the people with great talents and the community with a passion.

Cons

Some very poor executive decisions - termination of internal Helpline and community pinks; taking experienced employees for granted; fear of termination or outsourcing; loss of morale due to coworkers leaving the company; high turnover rate; no career growth unless you are into leadership/management (Vancouver); fear of getting fired for browsing Amazon at work!

Advice to Senior Management

Employee should be your #1 priority; focus on quality over quantity; more rewards/compensation to retain tenure workers for quality work and keep your talents in house; listen to what your people and the community have to say, not just go by the business needs and the latest and greatest.

What eBay should do - invest in own shipping services for lowered shipping cost; establish inventory warehouse like Amazon for popular items; simplify the site to target users of all ages and for the sake of ease of use - get rid of Best Match, it's great that you're taking care of fraud issues but without sellers you are nothing. Change is not always good, eBay have to realize that once people leave, they may not come back. Internally we should - bring back the helpline and community posters (pinks); do whatever you can to retain tenure reps - after all, eBay is all about its people and the community, let's not forget the core value.

Pros

The people, my coworkers. They make coming into work worth it, even if we all hate being there.

Cons

The attitudes of the upper management. We're not a charity, but we're killing our business that was built on the backs of members we don't want anymore.

Advice to Senior Management

At least be honest with the members, and tell them we don't want them instead of driving them away with harsh policies.

Pros

1. It's the fellow coworkers
2. RRSP matched by eBay, up to 4%
3. Stock purchase plan
4. Monthly (from metrics) and quaterly (changing to bi-yearly, based on company goals) bonuses

Cons

1. Upper management doesn't listen to any advice
2. Upper management makes stupid changes without thoroughly thinking it though
3. Work environment is too metric based. Case in point, there is a program that tells you when you need to take your lunch or break and if you don't do it at the time specified, you are deducted points. 2 min or 5 min over, it doesn't matter
4. Work life balance, if you do good, you get a good shift. Don't meet metrics once before shift bid is up, don't expect to get a good shift. Someone I know that use to work there got moved to late afternoon start from early mornings. Even though he said it conflicted with school, they still wouldn't budge.
5. Sick days, we don't get sick days. Sick one day, you get an occurrance. Get 5 - 7 occurrances and you can be terminated.
6. Can't take time off on the same day you request even though you have the banked hours.
7. Bugs. What can I say. There are bugs that have been open or known for a year and nothing is done.
8. Paypal and eBay customer service communication is the pits. Paypal issues get sent to eBay and vice versa on a daily basis with the offending rep saying "it's not a paypal issue" even though you are signed into paypal.com
9. Outsourced work. Sure, some company's outsource. When eBay started outsourcing, they said no jobs would be lost due to it. Well, jobs have been lost.
10. Outsourced workers (India and Phillipines) have a decent understanding of eBay issues. However, support for them has been removed last month. They now rely on this thing called "knowledge base". Good luck with that and helping a customer out with an unique issue. It's not always cookies and cache...
11. Closure or outsource of several key departments. Image services, account closures, Account security, Internal helpline support, etc just to name a few have been closed down or outsourced. With the closure of a department, you rarely have a chance to say where you want to go in the company. They just stick it to you and if you don't like it, they don't care if you leave. (ie: helpline going from a specialist position you had to apply for and being moved to a topbuyer entry position that ebay hired off the street)
12. The lying. Ask upper management something and even though they know the answer, it's either beat around the bush until you give up or they are not heard from again.

Advice to Senior Management

Listen to your customers and also your employees. I've heard gripes from customer service reps all the way to supervisors that say their advice or expertise falls on deaf ears.

Closure of the internal support helpline was a huge disappointment. It supported all the general support reps including the outsourcers and all the way up to the top account managers. They filed bugs, looked into issues, helped stop the changes that were suppose to go live in Q4 2008 that would have caused chaos (luckily you pushed it back). Nobody I've talked to can even fathom why this was done. You take a centralized and experienced team that did so much and you decentralized it to the team leads that don't even have the experience they had. Just wait until the leads find out you want them to do 90% queue work and also the rumor of the removal of our 5 year sabbaticals.

Topbuyer is your current "darling" initiative. What's going to happen when that fails? Are you going to reverse course and pamper the sellers?

It's all about the numbers to these upper management types. They don't care about anything except the numbers on the spreadsheet. To them, I'm just an employee number, there is no community.

Here are some eBay values they throw around and hope noboby sees past them.

1. We believe people are basically good - this is a good point, if they weren't good, there would be much more fraud on the site.
2. We recognize and respect everyone as a unique individual - is this really true? I don't see much respect at all from upper management. From customers to lowly employees, where the heck is the respect?
3. We believe everyone has something to contribute - Sure you do, but all those contributions mean nothing at all. Contribute advice? It gets trashed.

There are two more, not going to bother. There is just so much more behind the scenes which you poor paying customers do not know about.

Pros

- The people you work with are generally really nice and friendly.
- Paid Time Off
- Garunteed 40/week
- Great Customer Service Experience
- Free Gym, Bagel/Fruit/Pastry Day, Free Pop.
- Secured Building

Cons

- Big Brother type of working conditions.
- You are not welcomed when sick, but punished should you take a sick day.
- You're measured on your satisfaction (which includes the company itself). Negative comments means working 10x harder to "average" yourself out.
- You can't admit you work there right now. You feel like you might get yelled at or something.

Advice to Senior Management

To stop the changes just for a moment and hear your people. The Representatives are getting warn out taking all these complaints!!

Pros

The people within the organization that you work with on a daily basis including CSR's and fellow supervisors. A lot of good people work here and they help make it worthwhile.

Cons

The lack of communication within the company right now. Also, it doesn't seem like eBay really cares about the quality of the customer service experience it is providing its members.

Advice to Senior Management

Better communication with employees and with the members as a whole. Don't just pay lip service to the values of the company--actually try and put them into practice. Supervisors in particular are overworked and expected to pick up the slack when changes are implemented. We are expected to administer the front line ranks of interaction with the customer yet our day is filled with administrative minutiae--coaching and working the CSR's should be our priority but other tasks routinely interfere with that responsiblity.

Pros

In my opinion, I think it has good benefits as well as a competitive wage. I like working for a company that provides a really interesting service, where there is lots to learn and a constant challenge. You can't get bored working there; there is always something new to learn. The one thing that makes me reluctant to leave after all the changes is the fact that eBay has the best group of coworkers I've ever had. I think the job naturally attracts a lot of like-minded people. This was the first job I really liked, although that's now changed. A drama-free (or at least drama-lite) workplace.

Cons

Recent changes have made us all feel uncertain about our jobs. I used to go to work daily feeling glad that I got to work for eBay and that I finally had a job I liked. Then they randomly closed valuable departments, shifted people around, let a bunch of people go and it doesn't feel safe anymore. Our holiday party was replaced with an "appreciation luncheon". Well, we are no longer feeling appreciated; we are feeling scared for our jobs - both our positions and our employment in general. It is no longer the place it was when I started working there. I no longer feel like I have any opportunity for advancement, and the recent restructurings have made it difficult for me and my coworkers to get the help we need.

Advice to Senior Management

It was working better before.