Amazon loves to dangle new services in front of FBA and FBM sellers. I’ve covered some of them before, such as Amazon Transparency. Another one is Customer Service By Amazon, or CSBA. The value proposition: instead of you or your staff or VAs handling customer service inquiries, Amazon uses its crack team of overseas agents to take care of those pesky Amazon customer queries. Sounds great. But is Amazon CSBA worth it?
Here’s the actual Amazon CSBA pitch I received:
The stats at the bottom are very attractive. A-to-Z claims were reduced roughly 42%? Customer negative feedback was reduced by 37%? Sign me up!
What Amazon sellers say about Amazon CSBA
There’s a big problem, however: A lot of real Amazon sellers say the spin from Seattle is simply not true. In the Customer Service by Amazon review video I posted on the Lean Media YouTube channel (you can see the full video at the bottom of this post) some sellers said the negative feedback went up, not down: Others reported thousands of dollars in refunds that shouldn’t have been issued, on top of the cost of using Amazon CSBA.
Here’s what one seller said on my own video channel:
We used CSBA for a while and have decided to cancel. CSBA will give 100% refunds (on orders in the hundreds of dollars) for any reason or no reason, no questions asked. Will cost you thousands of dollars a month if you’re not careful.
At other times, the Amazon-provided data reveals other problems with the service.
Consider the stats Amazon CSBA provides about defects. How the heck can the Order Defect Rate (ODR) be reduced by 38%?
I mean, in almost all cases there either is or isn’t a defect. In a few edge cases, there may be a difference of opinion about what qualifies as a defect. Regardless, Amazon CSBA basically pays customers to withdraw the defect complaint by issuing a full refund, even if the complaint was not valid.
The quality of the Amazon agents is another issue. While some are very talented, many are either green, incompetent, or just don’t care about your business. Here’s what one seller said on the Amazon Seller Central forums:
I got an invite and oh my! Whenever Amazon asks me what the biggest barriers to my success are, I tell them Amazon is both by strongest partner and my biggest obstacle and cite CSRs as one of the bigger barriers. I can’t imagine what they would do for my customers.
Here’s another:
You really have to be able to completely trust anyone that is going to be customer facing. We personally value our customers and want to provide coherent customer support. From my experience Amazon is unable to provide that to us as sellers. About half of our customer interactions are “defective” or “need to return”. Amazon bots could handle that just fine. However for the other half where it’s actual questions, the customer is going to be as frustrated as I am calling seller support. Maybe I just have a small business mentality but that’s just not how I was raised.
So is Amazon CSBA worth it for any Amazon seller? Maybe for high volume, low defect, low cost items where issuing a small number of refunds won’t make a big difference in margins. But for my company, there is no way I will touch it, not just for the added cost, but also for the way they interact with customers and give blanket refunds no matter if they are justified or not.
Video: