Hello from Customer Support in Vancouver

A couple of weeks ago Mike Mason from our Customer Support office in Salt Lake stopped by with the first of what will hopefully be a long series of posts. I also mentioned that I was working on getting someone from their sister office in Vancouver to write as well, and I'm happy to say that my mission was a success! Meet Julie Drossos, one of our fantastic folks north of the border. She and Mike will be checking in periodically with news and updates about their parts of the eBay world.

  Hello everyone, my name is Julie (that’s me on the left) and I am writing from Customer Support in beautiful Vancouver! That’s Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada – not Vancouver, Washington. I work closely with Mike in Salt Lake City, who you met here on the blog a couple weeks ago. Mike and I both love working at eBay Customer Support and we’re excited to get this opportunity to connect with you, and to share a little about what goes on at our offices. In fact, there’s a chance that we may have met some of you last June at eBay Live! in Las Vegas. Perhaps you came to the Chatterbox to tell us your story or share your favourite purchase? Here is a photo of Mike and I in front of the Chatterbox…. Recognize us?!

Anyway, back to what we do here at Customer Support in Vancouver (by the way, that’s our home on the left!). Since we opened our doors in March of 2003, our office has grown from a humble group of brave souls who moved to Vancouver from the Salt Lake City office to get us up and running to a 24/7 office of over 1000 employees. Most of our employees are support reps, and they spend their days trying to ensure that you have the best and most efficient buying and/or selling experience possible on the site. Like our counterparts in Salt Lake City, we too handle a variety of Trust & Safety issues, as we are always striving to provide you with a safe and honest trading platform. A number of our people also work in the Live Chat department. These are the friendly people who are waiting to serve you via real time chat at the other end of the computer. Many of you have no doubt heard about eBay Express – if you’ve looked for help while on eBay Express, you’ve likely talked with one of our eBay Express Customer Service Specialists. (And if you haven’t yet experienced eBay Express, well what are you waiting for?!) In addition, we have a fantastic billing team here, and a number of our employees also support eBay buyers and sellers in countries around the world, including the UK, India, Australia, the Philippines, Malaysia, Singapore and more.

I’d like to introduce you to a few of the great people that lead the Vancouver Customer support centre:

Zach Pino is a Director here in Customer Support, and Ian Clarke is a Sr. Director. As you can see, they are a lot of fun. Being the nice guys they are, they are pictured here happily BBQ-ing burgers for all 1000+ of our employees on Canada Day last July.

As I mentioned, we are a 24/7 support centre. Having employees working long hours around the clock means that we have to ensure we have some fun at work too (especially since we don't have sheep to watch like at Mike's office)!

  For instance, last month we had our very own “eBayzing Race” (based on the popular TV show, The Amazing Race), here are the first half of the 120 participants from our office, ready to take-off at the start line!

Well, until next time, I hope you have enjoyed learning a little about the Vancouver Customer Support center and what we do here. Next time I hope to be able to show you a video tour of the Vancouver office, as we have lots of folks here that want to say hi to you all! Hope your October is off to a great start and I’ll be back soon!