Does Seller Support intentially act Useless in order to avoid responsibility?
I've been dealing with a couple of whoppers lately with Amazon support refusing to accept responsibility. They do this by their typical go to strategy of mindlessly repeating the same useless unhelpful answers without any care to put forth even the slightest bit of critical thinking. I call this the death loop of seller support. Anyone who sells on Amazon knows about this.
I am often bewildered to understand how Seller Support can be so terrible and how it is even possible that it continues to get worse. And everyone knows by now that AI could do a ten times better job than most of the humans in seller support. Like I said, the seller support personnel does not use critical thinking and most of the time they do not use their brain at all other than for basic necessities such as breathing.
But one thought keeps popping up in my mind.
What if they are doing this on purpose? What if they intentionally play dumb and act useless in hopes that we get frustrated and give up and just chalk up the expense as a part of doing business. I know I have given up more times than not. And regarding AI, perhaps they are not using AI because they know that applying critical thinking will cause a large uptick in reimbursements.
If the above is not the case, I am curious if the people at Amazon that actually do use their brains understand just how ungodly bad seller support is?
21 replies
Seller_LImVvUWeyiCfQ
I have a difficult time believing anyone in Seller Support is able to act of their own accord or "intentionally playing dumb and useless", but are rather following the procedure that's designed for them to follow. Critical thinking? Not part of the job description. Acting of their own accord is, I suspect, not allowed and might even be cause for termination, who knows. They follow a flow chart: if the question is this, do this. And yes, that often results in "repeating the same useless unhelpful answers".
Disclosure: I am in no way supporting this design of Amazon's.
I believe the source of the problem with Seller Support lies with Amazon itself. The Amazon platform is really designed to be a self-service platform. Almost everything you need to know can be found in Seller Help or Seller University. Anything beyond that is probably above Seller Support's pay grade and job description. Hence the practice of passing issues along to the "concern team" (which all too often leads to a black hole and is equally frustrating).
At least here in the forum one can usually get help from the Community Managers who are almost always able to escalate specific cases to a team that's designed to deal with them. Even then, sometimes that escalation is successful, sometimes not. Sometimes they drop into that same black hole.
I think almost everyone here understands your frustration. However, I believe Amazon is working the way TPTB have designed it to work, and that likely will never change.
Seller_I9d11ceJrcgoc
They must have a benchmark for speed of closing cases.
So, how would you keep your metrics up?
You would quickly do a copy paste of anything remotely related to the question, and click "ticket solved"
So yes, they intentionally do not help you.
Seller_09KR7FpTwByqj
they are really useless. The copy paste they do resolve the issue is unrelated to the question.
Seller_4K7eqIN4GuF2E
Their purpose is to delay you and force you to file a "plan of action". Because they do not want you to file for arbitration (where is you have filed a "POA" you will almost automatically lose.
We have a case with our attorney who is about to notify Amazon Corporate Legal about our demands. Basically a "buyer" filed for a return (remorse) but put 2 words in the reason "knock off". Of course the bots went crazy and removed us from the listing (which was one of our largest selling items).
So we complied with the reinstatement requirements (invoice within 365 days showing a purchase from the manufacturer of 400 units; original; made out to us, etc.). As allowed we redacted some confidential information and so indicated the invoice was redacted but none of the required information was removed.
So of course Amazon rejects it but does NOT tell us why. We call seller support (what a joke) and they ask us for tracking information. First that is NOT required in the documentation and 2nd, since the factory's warehouse is 30 miles from us we pick up large orders. Next this "seller support specialist" says we did "not pay sales tax". Is that a joke. We purchase wholesale TAX EXEMPT (as most businesses do). The sales tax is paid by the ultimate end user - i.e.: the Amazon "buyer".
I have posted about this before and not one single "mod" responded - because their job is to continue to delay and discourage arbitration.
I expect Amazon legal will settle with us not wanting an arbitrator to smack them down and pay us damages in addition to other relief.
Seller_aYU9Ks7KFgEZT
yes, the provide the minimal possible support, and make it the most difficult and time consuming for you in hopes that you just give up and don't bother anymore.
Seller_YEx45VKRcAVGN
I know the death loop well but disagree that AI would be better since it very much feels like they are using it already to give the canned help responses. One trick I have learned is to not restate the case or give explanation of the original query in your responses. This means there are no key words in the response to trigger the canned response option. I simply will state.
Please read initial correspondence, the answer given was irrelevant.
This forces the manual read versus key word prompted response. It works about 50% of the time though I still have to resend that about 3 times. Nothing is foolproof though when dealing with "support".
Seller_LyYw7fQRKc5G7
Seller Support?
What is that?
We use the forums for a reason, asking SS is pointless.
Seller_Owdxic6jQ3PDQ
they are useless acting to be useless !
Seller_tAfXR7sVBEoZS
I would say it is by design, but it could just be an "added benefit" for Amazon.
Seller_8bKTbjGobJoAL
No, they don't act useless, they actually are useless
