There’s been an outpouring of anger towards eBay in the comments over on the NY Times Bits blog (see here, here and here). Both buyers and sellers complain about poor customer service from eBay, and sellers complain about high prices. I think the issues about customer service are somewhat understandable. When your business is growing at 30% a year, customer service is probably the last thing on your mind. But 30% growth doesn’t last forever, and even eBay will one day have to live with single-digit growth and will have to care about more mundane things like customer service. It’s funny that in the long run, even a high-tech business depends on low-tech things like dealing with complaints and treating customers nicely.

I think such problems are not confined to eBay. I’ve also heard some complaints about Google’s customer service, in particular from advertisers and websites who use its Adsense/Adwords programme. Again I think it can be understood — from what I’ve read about Google’s corporate culture, innovation is everything, which is fine, but ultimately sufficient resources will have to be allocated to the boring task of taking care of customers.

I have a personal gripe about the customer service of another tech company, Technorati. I use the data that they make available to generate my econ blogs ranking. Following a suggestion by Felix Salmon, I want to report the Technorati authority score for each blog as well as its Technorati ranking. However, the automated Technorati service that I use to retrieve their data sometimes fails to return the authority score for some blogs. It seems like a bug to me. So I contacted them about this a few weeks ago, and since then I’ve heard nothing except an automated reply that gave no useful information. It seems like customer service isn’t a priority at Technorati either.