I left during the time of Meg. Talking with my friends who are still at eBay (although that is fewer and fewer people as time goes on) and reading the comments that other people have left here, I got out at the right time.
Much of my time with the company was good, but even during my few years, customer service went downhill markedly. At first, only a few things were outsourced (mainly very basic customer service email questions), and the outsourcing companies were still in Canada. As time went on, more and more things were outsourced - more complex customer service emails, Live Chat, International questions, selling tool questions, image service questions, etc. Mumbai and the Philippines got more and more of the workload, and the quality loss was apparent. Emails could be routed for weeks between service partners, answers often had tangential or no relationship to the questions asked, and the unhappiness of the customers was obvious for anyone to see.
The niggling over metrics also increased remarkably. People were fired for missing productivity metrics by 1 or 2 percent (quite literally). The productivity metrics increased by leaps and bounds. If you got a bad quality review which was not in fact an error on your part, too bad so sad - the process to overturn a bad quality review was to appeal it to the quality team. And since the quality team was penalized for having quality review overturned, as you can imagine, reversals of quality reviews almost never happened. And customer satisfaction? You were ranked on both your satisfaction and eBay's satisfaction, so if the site was down or some feature wasn't working, that was a strike against you.
Management's decisions also became more divorced from reality as time went on. eBay Express was a wonderful example of that. No one wanted Amazon Lite, but we were going to get it anyway, come hell or high water. Meanwhile, real innovation went the way of the dodo.
Now that Meg is gone, the decisions have just gotten worse and worse. Getting rid of Helpline was one of the dumbest customer service decisions ever made by eBay. You had a group of people with a massive knowledge base of eBay centralized in one location, ready to give support to anyone from Mumbai to the top of the customer service chain, and you threw them to the wind. The logic fails me on that decision.
