eBay's 5 Steps for Optimizing the Customer Experience

“[eBay] grew and expanded rapidly,” explains Cathal Murphy, Director of Customer Experience at eBay Australia and New Zealand. “As a result, customer experience wasn’t
our biggest strength in the beginning. Over the last couple of years, the company is
more aligned throughout the organisation to the customer experience. It’s part of
our whole evolution cycle.”

Overall strategy
As a company matures, there’s more focus on the customer experience and
retaining existing customers. The key thing is to put the customer in all decisions
made within the business.

We’re ensuring that everybody, across the whole organisation, has some shared
goals and objectives. Everything we do needs to be on brand, ensuring that the
customer has a voice at the table when the decisions are being made. Product,
marketing, PR – all decisions made will be based around that customer voice.

Finding the silent sufferers
The ownership is on the people that look after the customer experience side, to
bring the customer to life in the business.

We’ll do that through the stories that we tell, bringing customers in, using our online
network, and organising customer events. It’s the on-going communication around
customer experience and the customer journey.

We get a lot of input from the customers that contact us, but that’s a very low
percentage of our overall user base. One of the things we’ve been working on is
expanding our listening posts, so that we’re not just making decisions on the
customers that do contact us. It’s starting to look at how we can understand and
interact with those customers that never contact us – could they be silent sufferers?
It’s those customers who might encounter a problem, give up and never use eBay
again. We want to hear about those experiences. Customer visits, going to where
our customers are, running focus groups, monitoring our social coverage and really
putting ourselves in the shoes of the customer by using the product ourselves – it all
helps.

We’re trying to really look at our organisation to find those pain points and
challenges, and leverage that information to see if there’s anything we can learn.
Overlay that intelligence with the data we have and we can start to identify weak
spots and areas requiring our focus.

Acting in the middle ground
The nature of our business is quite unique. Our buyers and sellers communicate with
each other and we’re often not privy to that.

Our role, particularly with our sellers, is to ensure they’re communicating effectively
and delivering a standard of customer service that matches our values.

If we see that a seller has low communication ratings on their feedback, we’ll work
with them to really analyse and identify what they’re doing wrong. At the end of the
day, even though that communication isn’t directly with us, it’s a reflection on our
brand so we want to improve that where possible.

Engage early for business growth
Another focus for us is early engagement to truly understand who our customers are
– how can we support them and how can we enable them to be successful?
With our sellers, we’re trying to move away from just being reactive and responding
to an issue when they get in contact. Instead we’re going to put triggers in place to
help identify potential issues or opportunities earlier.

We can then reach out, educate, coach and mentor our sellers, helping them to grow
and scale their business. In turn, that’s going to create better experiences for our
consumers. It’s one of the areas where we’ve invested a lot.

Consumer expectations are constantly changing. Many sellers need somebody to
mentor them and coach them about how they need to adapt to remain competitive.
Sometimes, the service they were offering two or three years ago might just not be
competitive anymore and they’ll need to change their business model. That’s where
we have a large role to play, being a mentor and coach for them.

If at first you don’t succeed…
The root of excellent customer experience is in your employees. I’m always pushing
my team to look at how we can be bolder and more creative around the customer
experience. Let’s do the experiments, let’s do tests, let’s measure the ROI. But
ultimately, let’s not be afraid to push the boundaries and try new things.

Several organisations just don’t take enough risks. It’s something I really encourage
in my team – it’s ok to fail.

I think the question that we need to ask ourselves is: Are we failing enough? If we’re
not, it probably means we’re not being bold enough or being creative enough.

It’s absolutely fine to fail.