Original Post
As we’ve been reading the comments posted on this board, it’s become clear that one of the issues that you are concerned about is Customer Service. There’s evidence of this in the questions you are posting and the emails that I am personally receiving. We take these comments pretty seriously. Today, I wanted to let you know what we’re doing on the Customer Service front and give you some tips for getting faster and better resolution.
Training and Staffing
To get you the answers you need, we need to staff the CS group at appropriate levels and train the group to answer your questions. This week, we’ve brought 10 new customer service representatives on line and have conducted training for new reps and refresher training for our existing reps. This will help us provide faster turnaround and better answers when you write us.
How To Get Help
The best way to get help is to use the Help Wizard. It can be found here: http:/
Using the wizard helps in three ways. First, you may find the answer via the wizard and not need to contact Customer Service at all. This is obviously the fastest, most direct way to get an answer. Second, when you DO contact us it helps us route the question to the person who is best equipped to handle your problem. Third, using the wizard lets us know who you are and your basic account and transaction information. It saves us from having to ask you basic questions – again, a nice time saver.
Sending an Email
OK, the wizard is clearly the best way to contact us, but what if you want to email us or if you can’t find and answer through the wizard? There are two basic email addresses to remember.
The first is sellerpayments@half.com. This email address is for all seller payment related issues. This is the address to use if you didn’t get a deposit, have questions about your payment history on the site, etc. You should expect an answer on these types of questions in 48-72 hours.
The second email address is service@half.com. This address handles ALL OTHER questions – in other words, anything that is NOT related to seller payments. Depending on your question, you should expect different turn around times. Here are some examples:
General Questions – 24 hours
Billing or Credit Card Issues – 96 hours (we sometimes need to do detailed research on these types of problems, so they often take a little longer)
Order Problems or Buyer Refund Issues – Up to 72 hours. At present, this email queue is a little behind. We’re focusing extra reps on this queue to get the response time back in line.
Coupons or Gift Certificates – 48 hours
If I haven’t specifically called out a response time here, you should expect to get an answer in about 24 hours. As with anything, response time can vary based on volume – sometimes it will be a little less, sometimes a little more.
What About the Boards?
The boards are a great way to bring up issues, get up to date on what your peers are doing and thinking and have conversations and discussions about Half.com and other topics.
With that said, the boards are not the best way to ask questions and get answers. The best way to do that is to contact Customer Service. Customer Service has systems and tools that allow them to track emails, report bugs to our tech team, track repeat questions and trends, etc. The boards are a terrific way to communicate with you all, but they are not as effective as a tool for tracking issues and responding to specific questions.
This does not mean that we won’t be on the boards conversing with you. We’ll continue to do that. However, we may not be there every single day, and we won’t respond to every single question. We WILL read the boards every day and we WILL be sure to incorporate your thoughts, ideas and feedback into our plans for the site.
I hope this provides a good overview of what we’re doing to improve service as well as how to get help. I want to hear from you, but I recognize that I’m not the world’s best customer service representative. In fact, I’m a bottleneck for all of you that are writing me with general questions. I’d encourage each of you to write customer service when you have a problem – and keep writing me on features ideas and suggestions.
Thanks for reading. We appreciate your feedback and support.
GL
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