It is hard not to be impressed with how eBay collects, analyzes and turns customer feedback into action. By creating cross-functional “Agile” teams, eBay has found a way to take feedback and quickly use it to positively impact their customers.

These Agile teams use a variety of data collection methods that ensures that real issues are uncovered.  Specifically, they interact with their customers through; mail, on-line chat and phone to ensure that they get a holistic view of customer requirements. This is really smart since each one of these methods of data collection has its strengths and weaknesses.

This ongoing feedback helps eBay manage the changing demands of their customers that are becoming more and more sophisticated. This feedback is provided to a variety of service and product organizations that then reevaluate objectives and processes. That means agents provide better service, managers provide better coaching and product managers are more innovative. That is how businesses change and get better.

However, what I found most interesting is how the Agile teams start with an in-depth analysis, which is conducted from the customer perspective. This is a key step.  Almost always, when there is a systemic customer issue, the root cause is unclear communications. As we all know from our own purchasing experiences, policy documents are arduous and written from the company’s perspective. Therefore, these documents are almost unreadable, and are almost always add unnecessary confusion for the reader. For whatever reasons, companies never spend enough time developing materials for the customer that is concise, clear and complete.

eBay’s team fixed this problem by using sound information design to rewrite their material by using a more graphical approach and simply answering the key questions asked by their customers.  As easy as this sound, it is not, and eBay deserves credit for taking this action. And their NPS scores went up.

The eBay team also impressed me by how they developed an IT solution that engaged the customer real time.  By “mining” key words that point toward a potential policy breech, they present their customers with easy to read “rights” and “wrongs.”  That is not only efficient but will lead to reducing detractors to their business.  That is smart.

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