Case Study: Homeworking Enhances eBay Experience


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eBay has improved its VIP customer experience with homeworking agents – enabled by Magnetic North’s contact centre software.

Expert Planet is a teleservices provider based in the USA that has worked with the online auction site eBay since 2008. It has a base of over 5,000 agents throughout the USA, with a combination of office and home-based workers.

The challenge

Unlike a more traditional retailer, as an auction site, eBay’s customers are both those that buy and those that sell. The company has an active community of online sellers, many of whom make a living purely through the site, as well as thousands of retailer businesses who sell through the site.

Those who have sold over a set volume through eBay are credited as the site’s ‘PowerSellers’, and are eBay’s real VIP customers. As eBay’s revenue comes from its commission on sales through the site, the PowerSellers are more than that – they are what run the business, almost part customer, part employee, part stakeholder.

For this reason, it is important for the company’s business model that its PowerSellers truly do get VIP-level customer service.

The solution

eBay outsources its customer communications to Expert Planet, with the teleservices provider employing a network of eBay customer service agents.

Expert Planet’s eBay agents are homeworkers, able to connect to Magnetic North’s contact centre software from wherever they are as it is all centralised in the cloud.

They are also all eBay PowerSellers themselves, meaning that they have all the expertise required to communicate with eBay’s most valued customers.

The outsourcer is also required to communicate new features on the eBay platform to the PowerSellers. The company are able to use Contact Flow Editor to plan and schedule communications that work for a dispersed network of sellers and agents.

The intelligent call scripting can then be used, creating a personalised script for each outbound call based on the history and the responses of the PowerSeller being contacted and the message being communicated.

The benefits

One recent major example of an eBay update that needed communicating to PowerSellers was the launch of global shipping. eBay started offering sellers the ability to send items globally, via a US-based shipping centre from which they will be distributed.

Initially the new feature was communicated via the eBay site and in email communication, at which point opt-in for the service was under 10%. Expert Planet conducted a campaign to reach out to PowerSellers and explain the new service, which resulted in a huge uplift, increasing opt-ins to over 70%.

The success was driven by personalisation. The key messages were the same, but dynamic call scripting – in combination with the ability to use a workforce of homeworking experts – allowed Expert Planet to communicate those messages on a personal level to a community that is both demanding customers and experts in their own right.

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Ghen Sugimoto

“Our vision has always been to offer unique teleservices solutions through technology. When addressing the complexity of eBay’s customer communications, we looked for best-in-class technology that could help solve that problem,” said Ghen Sugimoto, Chief Marketing Officer at Expert Planet. “We challenged the team at Magnetic North to customise its advanced call flow and dynamic call scripting tools to help us, and they rose to that challenge by delivering technology that allows us to deploy a completely flexible, personalised customer experience with the most qualified agents for the job, regardless of their location.”

 

Author: Megan Jones

Published On: 29th Jul 2015 - Last modified: 31st Aug 2021
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