While unfortunately we cannot attribute our success to the power of the blogosphere, we would like to note that since our last post about eBay choosing to suspend us (and one more very stiffly-worded mail to their customer support), they've seen fit to reinstate us.
We received a reply (which again took about three days) that assured us our mail had been thoroughly read and that our concerns had been noted, and that based on the information we'd faxed and another review of the circumstances our account had been reanimated. We're a touch sceptical about whether eBay has any Japanese-reading personnel who could have deciphered our Japanese-language documents and actually done the "review" they claim; we're apt to take the response we got as the closest we're likely to get to an admission that they ballsed things up.
In the meantime, we'd found the item we were looking for elsewhere; it's going through Japanese customs as we speak...
As a rule (and that doesn't mean "in general"; it means "I have a rule that says I do not"), I don't post rants on this blog. I am making an exception, though, because eBay have made me exceptionally pissed off.
I may have my gripes about this firm or that, but I haven't been stunned by a company's sheer inability to grasp how it should treat customers for quite a while. I'm obviously not alone in this, as mounting complaints have recently prompted eBay to commit to improvements to its customer service effort (including adding phone support and having humans answer email rather than sending autoresponses).
From what I can see, they are getting off to a sluggish start.
I only registered with eBay a couple of weeks ago. Being resident in Tokyo, if I want to pick up a Sony PSP or look for something that's cheap because it's old stock I go to Yahoo Japan Auctions or Rakuten. However, I happened to be looking for a particular thing that only seems to show up on eBay. So I signed up.
After placing a couple of exploratory bids here and there and getting my watchlist items set, I logged in on the morning of February 8 to find that my account had been suspended. There's a great message to inform you of this:
You have been suspended from eBay because our records indicate your account was involved in activities that violate our policies.
If you feel you have been suspended in error or want to appeal this decision by providing additional information, please contact us.
An email regarding this was sent to you at xxx@xxx.
Now, had I been shilling bids, or trafficking in stolen goods or child pornography? Nope. Has someone 0wned my account? I hope not. Is it a clerical error? Seems the most likely assumption.
Read on after the jump for more.
In my inbox I find the following:
Subject: FPA Notice: eBay Registration Suspension - Invalid Contact Information
Dear xxxxxxxxx,
We regret to inform you that your eBay account has been suspended due to the
violation of our site policy below:
* Invalid User Information - Our records show that there are discrepancies in the information that you registered with on our site. Accordingly, your account will be suspended indefinitely until valid information can be provided.
Due to the suspension of this account, please be advised you are prohibited from using eBay in any way including registering a new account.
Please note that this suspension does not relieve you of your agreed-upon obligation to pay any fees you may owe to eBay.
I also find that I have an email informing me that one of my bids (on a finished auction, bizarrely) has been cancelled. Clicking through to the bid history page for the item, I find that my bid, together with my user name, is listed in a separate section at the bottom of the page and shown as having been cancelled for administrative reasons. Assuming that this is visible to the entirety of eBay, that sounds like a good way to give everyone the impression that I'm a guy who is up to no good.
I wait until steam stops issuing from my head and write three or four fairly stiff emails under various categories in eBay's web-based customer feedback form. The gist of these is: It's not nice to give customers the impression that you think they are evil; if you need to have stricter checks on their information, make sure the checks don't produce false positives; do the checks before you register them rather than lassoing them in mid-stride; and if you have to suspend them, tell them in the same mail what exactly is wrong and how to get their account unblocked rather than making them ask you.
On February 11 I get a reply saying that as eBay has to "preserve the proprietary nature" of these "violations" they can't tell me what the "discrepancies" in my information are. What I need to do is fax them a declaration printed out from their site that includes my contact information and a statement that, "under penalty of perjury", I certify that it's correct; I also have to send them a copy of a government-issued ID and a recent credit card bill. Hope you read Japanese, guys, because Japanese government agencies and corporations aren't all that into providing information in English if they don't feel like it. They also note that unfortunately, as part of tougher anti-fraud measures some "honest users" may be forced to go through a couple of extra steps before they can use eBay. They don't seem to appreciate that this statement should read "may abruptly be suspended after they were already happily using eBay, and have to jump through several hoops in order to continue doing so", and that having a tough registration process is quite different from suspending people who're already registered and treating them like crooks.
I don't have a fax at home, so I send them this stuff from the office on February 14. I also send them an email reply noting that the documentation is in Japanese and that I hope this is OK, and asking for a general customer service address to which I can direct my concerns. They're supposed to get back to me in "up to 48-72 hours" on the account suspension -- a warped grammatical construction that I assume is intended to mean "up to 72 hours" while emphasising that it might be less to reduce customer ire. From my experience thus far I suspect it in fact means "72 hours or longer". They also note, ominously, that emailing them in the meantime will result in delays. So I've probably just put myself to the bottom of the pile.
Since then, radio silence.
A look at Technorati for "eBay customer service" shows that the blogosphere is buzzing fitfully about this issue, and confirms that mainstream media have picked up the story that customer complaints are mounting. As I said above, eBay has promised improvements in customer service in response to this; but it also looks like their new and more draconian anti-fraud measures are being implemented very much in the style of the old customer-service regime--i.e., unhelpful, unresponsive, automated.
I'm amazed eBay doesn't seem to realise that it has a customer-relations apocalypse brewing, but if my experience is anything to go by, they'll find it hard to ignore before long.
We'll get back to normal programming now, but post any experiences you'd like to share in the comments below.
The official Lord of the Rings site reports that the translator responsible for the Japanese subtitles for the first film is to be ditched from the second after numerous complaints from fans. A Japanese article at Slashdot Japan notes that the translator concerned is Natsuko Toda, probably the only member of the profession to be a household name here, and who tends to get subtitling work for most of the juiciest releases.
I've watched numerous films subtitled by Ms. Toda and I must admit they generally do contain a few clangers, mostly simple errors of interpretation. (I am a compulsive reader of Japanese video subtitles purely because they're in my line of sight; at the cinema they're displayed vertically on the right of the screen, out of the way). I have heard the theory that she's just putting concerns of style or space ahead of outright accuracy--getting something that's plausible Japanese and within the character limits is probably not easy--but even so, changing things outright has got to be exceeding one's responsibilities.