Last month, Etsy’s Jeff Shah took to the company forums to address poor response times for customer support. He announced that Etsy users would now be able to tag certain emails as “urgent,” which would move them to the front of the line. He also said that Etsy would be hiring more people to handle the increased volume of customer service issues, and that some sort of real-time support would be launching soon.
Today, Etsy announced that they’re finally launching phone support – in November.
With the new support, Etsy’s goal is to offer it 12-7, and to respond to urgent issues with phone calls within 10 minutes of notification.
“We are still working out the final details, but we’re planning to offer phone support as a call-back service 7 days a week, 12 hours a day, in English. Members will find an option to “request a call” on Etsy’s contact page when they select any Direct Checkout question from the drop-down menu (or if their account is suspended). They will then submit their phone number and a brief description of their question. Our goal is to make all calls within 10 minutes of the request, which will give us enough time to look into the member’s request before getting on the phone and avoid extended hold times later,” says Shah.
Not every issue is weighed equally, however, and the phone support is going to be targeted at those Etsy users experiencing problems with either Direct Checkout or those who have had their shops suspended for some reason.
Speaking of Direct Checkout, Etsy recently expanded that feature to include 9 new currencies and 15 new markets.
A couple months ago, Etsy hit the 30 million user milestone. With a growing user base, comes growing support issues. Etsy hopes to provide its users with a more reliable way to get their problems solved by putting a real human voice on the other end.
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