Official PayPal Customer Service Suggestion Thread

[GordB]

Hi all,

I'm trying to find a way to be constructive with PayPal and I think that it would be great if we had a spot here in which we can make customer service suggestions that actually can be seen by staff and hopefully implemented.  No anger, no attitudes, just some good, reasonably doable suggestions for customer service improvement.  Don't just state your problem. Rather, suggest to PayPal on how you'd specifically achieve the improvement.  I have three suggestions that would help us all immensely:

Problem #1:

The Message Center says that, "Messages are worked on in the order they're received..."  The problem with that is that if we don't get the help we need after a long wait (days or weeks), we get shoved to the back of the priority line again.  When customers reach the front of the priority line, they should stay there.  This issue causes a cycle causing simple solutions to take months.

Solution:

Change it to, "Customer service issues are resolved in the order they're received...."  Once a PayPal rep is on a case, they must solve it quickly for the customer prior to going to the next customer.  PayPal, you should award your reps for their abilities to solve issues for customers, not for the amount of callbacks they make.  If a customer receives ten callbacks, that's a bad thing and not a good one.  If your goal is one callback per customer, because solutions are immediately found, PayPal's costs go down while customers satisfaction improves.  Also, with people's stores up and running sooner rather than later, PayPal begins to profit from those customers earlier with a quicker resolution.  With this change, PayPal's profit actually increases two different ways, so why wouldn't you do it immediately?

Problem #2:

PayPal's support team cannot do anything to directly help customers resolve security issues.  All they can do is forward a message to security.  If the security team's response doesn't help, they we get shoved to the back of the priority line and the process literally has to start again from scratch.  In my case, the security team's lack of a relevant response is actually the cause of the extended time of my issue.  It's a vicious, negative cycle that's costing all of us, PayPal included (for the reasons stated previously).

Solution:

Give your customer service reps direct phone access to your security team so that they can get the details they need in minutes with relevant, accurate and helpful information.  Instead of dealing with customers' issues for weeks or months, the time can be reduced to minutes.  This should be an important goal and PayPal, you don't need to invest into any new resources for this.

Problem #3:

The security team currently has no accountability for how the quality of their work affects their customers.  For example, in my case, they keep emailing me to follow detailed instructions in a notification on my account, but they're simply never there.  These instructions are supposed to specifically show me how to, "Identify Third-Party Agent."  However, I can't do what they ask because they've withheld these detailed instructions from me repeatedly.   I've tried various ways to get the message to them that they're doing this to me, even through phone reps, but those messages are constantly being ignored.  To be honest, this the quality of their work is extremely poor and needs vast improvement if they're not even reading their messages.

Solution:

Do regular internal audits of the work your security team is doing on a regular, ongoing basis.  Check the work they do and their email communications on a case-by-case basis to see how the steps they have taken have affected customer outcomes.  Implement changes to their processes based on these findings and check their responses to those changes in subsequent audits.  Reward them for their improvements.

Summary:

These changes can only save money for PayPal because you'd vastly be reducing the time put into each customer issue.  Every single issue on this forum could be resolved in a very short amount of time, so why wouldn't you do it?  Doing more work in less time means you're more efficient, you're lowering your costs and you're getting your customers accounts back up and running sooner, so you can make your profits from them once again.  I've been on the phone with PayPal a number of times without help, with reps that you pay hourly.  I could have had my issue resolved in one, quick phone call, but with many more than that, it's still dragging on for us both and in the end, costing us both money.  Your reps are putting too much time into each customer with all the unnecessarily repeated callbacks and my online store is currently closed because of the issues above.

In general, there should be a better effort made towards continuous improvement to your customer experience.  If you're the rep the get's these changes implemented, then you're the one that gets the promotion when new positions are posted.  That's the way these things work so why wouldn't you actively promote these?  Last of all, can anyone help me with my issue?