“You must have hit the back button.”
– PayPal representative explaining to my wife why she wound up paying an eBay seller the same amount for the same item three times
In the decade that the Internet has become a central feature of our culture, online commerce has gone from pipe dream through experimental service to mainstream business. The effect on the average consumer has been profound.
Take my wife: Just a scant five years ago Mrs. Gibbs thought that computers were just another thing to dust. She now has become proficient at navigating the Web and a dab hand at eBay auctions. But when the services she uses behave erratically, she is lost.
Us old hands know what bad online application performance looks like. We know – at least roughly – what an error means even when it is a ridiculously general message such as “unexpected error.”
But give non-technical consumers such as Mrs. Gibbs a PayPal response that says “We are sorry that we are experiencing temporary technical difficulties. Please try again later. Message 3005,” and they’re lost.
Note that eBay owns PayPal, and the two businesses are now so inextricably intertwined that they are to all intents and purposes the front and back ends of the same commercial engine.
Anyway, such was the situation with PayPal over the last few days when Mrs. Gibbs found that she had made multiple payments for the same item to the same seller. She had tried to pay for an item and wound up with “Message 3005” and tried again immediately, a few hours later and then the next day. Later she found multiple payments had been made on some items while other transactions hadn’t been executed at all! Mrs. Gibbs, of course, enrolled me in sorting out the problem.
My first call to PayPal entailed a wait of 35 minutes followed by a conversation with a customer service representative who didn’t care about my problem because she didn’t understand and so had no idea how to handle it. Her conclusion was that it was my wife’s fault. The rep contended that my wife had hit the back button and caused the money to be transferred multiple times.But the transaction is done over SSL so hitting the back button doesn’t work.
The rep declared that it wasn’t their problem and that we would have to correspond with the payee and get them to reverse the transaction. This did my temper no good at all.
Of course this wasn’t my only call to PayPal. Sorting things out took two more calls totaling 65 minutes. The result was the conclusion by customer service that PayPal’s servers were overloaded and they couldn’t do anything so I would have to sort out for myself how to pay for the eBay items.
My thoughts about this are simple: First, the dominant players online are vulnerable to competition because their size combined with rate of growth makes them as fundamentally incompetent and inefficient as, for example, a telephone company.
Second, these companies misunderstand the role of customer service. Customer service is there to sort out problems. If they can’t, then customer service becomes a kind of anti-sales operation ensuring that customer loyalty is low and customer churn is high.
Maybe it is good that eBay, PayPal and all other the behemoths of online commerce don’t get the customer service issue. It keeps the market fluid, letting competition and innovation arise and thrive on the back of the inefficiencies and stupidities of the market’s incumbents.
On the other hand, if I have to keep dealing with these kinds of operations I might just retire to a cabin in the woods and leave the whole mess to a younger, more patient generation of Internet consumers. They will, in turn, get frustrated and disillusioned with online commerce. It might never end.
Contact customer disservice at backspin@gibbs.com.
