Confronting Newegg Face-to-Face
Video Statistics and Information
Channel: Gamers Nexus
Views: 1,408,951
Rating: undefined out of 5
Keywords: gamersnexus, gamers nexus, computer hardware, newegg, newegg gamersnexus, newegg interview, newegg scam, newegg rip off, newegg open box, newegg motherboard, newegg cpu, newegg bent pins
Id: d1R4wbuXFII
Channel Id: undefined
Length: 73min 13sec (4393 seconds)
Published: Mon Feb 21 2022
Please note that this website is currently a work in progress! Lots of interesting data and statistics to come.
Crazy that 3/4 people in that room have worked there for less than a year.
My spouse had worked in a number of customer service departments and if you want to get to the root of the problem (in our eyes) skip to about 25:55 or so.
Key Performance Insights fall onto their Customer Service Teams, right away this is an extreme incentive to deny someone. Even a good CS rep will begin sweating over their year-end evaluation numbers if they accept multiple RMA's or returns in a row
Newegg was not allowing CS-Reps to consider account history. A decade-old Newegg customer gets treated the same way as a bot that attempted a dozen RMA's with sketchy stories, so everyone leans towards the "probably fraud" side (Newegg claims to be changing this in the video)
Policies are made by upper-management and have to trickle down several levels before hitting the Customer Service Teams
Pressure placed on lower employees (Steve notes likely making $15-$18/hour) prevents upper management from seeing flaws in the policy so it can only ever get worse. A product with a high amount of confirmed-DOA's would surely cause management to go hound the manufacturers, but this never happens because too many approved returns in a row means a CS-Rep is generating too much loss and they'll just decide to not risk their job and safely slap a "denied" on the ticket
And finally - Customer Support is a REALLY high job-hopper career. Every good rep will job hop to the known good places, report to all of the various call-center communities (there's several), and hop to a better one until they land at a GOOD spot. Newegg's paygrade and heavy blind reliance on numbers means that I'm 100% sure that they're only getting the bottom-of-the-barrel reps or people with no service experience whatsoever. People that only care to collect the paycheck and go home (not saying that anything is wrong with that, but you CANNOT have a customer-facing department that is entirely made-up of these types).
Andrew might have put it best. They were all too worried about publicly being called out about how they're taking advantage of customers, I take it not just with returns, that they weren't thinking about the customers. All of their wording is to protect the company, not the customer.
that Terry Cox dude is has been in corporate so long he knows only how to speak in corporate word salads like a politician without actually saying anything.
Maybe I'm too much of a cynic, but this just felt like typical PR damage control for an hour with nothing actually meaningful coming out of it. Only time will tell, but I won't be buying from them regardless, so my opinion is secondary to the outcome.
It sticks out to me that so many of the people newegg sent in to deal with Steve had not been with the company or in their roles for very long. That could just be a coincidence, but it also sounds a little bit like brain drain.
The RMA process they describe at the ~24min mark seems fundamentally flawed, prone to creating this type of issue.
In the case of Steve's motherboard, the "anything else" was left blank.
The executive stresses that this second level RMA doesn't have the power to make decisions yes or no decisions, they just fill out the ticket. As they are probably impacted by throughput KPIs, I'm willing to be the chance of them actually filling in the "anything else" field is low.
They never see the physical motherboard, they simply make final decisions based on the yes or no answers from the second level RMA team.
These are the people who should have been taking into account customer history, but apparently haven't until now. So they have been doing little more than rejecting or accepting RMA requests based on a set of yes or no question. Might as well have been an automated program.
When asked if this team was held responsible for RMA reject/accept KPIs, the answer was "Unfortunately"
My key takeaways:
They might not even be aware of the power they have.
Solutions?
Newegg's current solution is to automatically accept all open-box returns, actually train their customer support team take customer history into account and open up an executive "return-appeal line". But that still leaves massive holes for anything that isn't open box. They need a permanent solution.
Option one: Get rid of the Customer support RMA team, transfer all it's responsibilities to the second level RMA team. (which was the old setup Paul described from his time working in Newegg's RMA department)
Option two: Keep the customer support RMA team, but all it does is check the customer's purchasing history and make a description to accept the RMA without a full examination. Otherwise it get's escalated back to a third level RMA team that makes the final decision (with access to the physical product) and handles appeals.
What I found the most concerning in that interview is that Newegg representatives didn't list a single relevant procedural/systemic issue themselves, and it was Steve speculating what could have gone wrong. They don't know what really is wrong, even after their claimed investigations. They didn't have a plan targetting any internal system, only adding more communication channels that are only a (tedious for the customer) workaround for the real issue Steve outlined.
I think this was well done by Steve, but a very odd setup from both parties. Specifically, the offer to meet to discuss Steve's issue was what Newegg was after (as heard through their poor PR lamb lol) but Newegg clearly should have known this would turn into a larger expose once Steve started making more videos on the subject.
All that said, there is a tricky spot both Steve and Newegg are in in this interview. On the one hand, Steve has vetted (hundreds?) emails from other customers indicating they have also experienced seemingly unfair RMA denials, and the implication could have been made that this behavior is neweggs policy. This would constitute fraudulent behavior, and I am sort of amazed that neither party mentioned that one word "fraud", more than in reference to customers attempting to "defraud" newegg with false RMAs.
On the other, Steve is really concerned with Newegg's position in the retail industry as a competitor, and so doesn't want to directly accuse the company of negligent or criminal behavior if things might change in the near term. This is good constructive behavior but I'm not sure Newegg is redeemable.
You could tell, especially when listening to Don Gwizdak, VP of operations, who specifically listed his subordinates as the fulfillment group including the returns department, that he was all too eager to call each and every instance of this issue an "error" or "mistake" made by employees at the first or second level of customer contact. Simply put, this VP is in charge of the policies that his returns department follows, and given the evidence being collected by Steve, his department is effectively defrauding some of its customers by policy.
If Steve had come out and said that, I'm sure the interview would have been over quickly, and its a great service he is doing in attempting to expose this to the public.
Thank you /u/Lelldorianx , I wish you and your team all the best.