Does giving customers a place to report problems just increase the number of complaints or does it really help with dispute resolution and customer satisfaction?

In a recent article by ebay’s first Director of Online Dispute Resolution he recounts how ebay created its dispute resolution team which now serves 250 million registered buyers and sellers.

He observes that the first step was to make reporting disputes easier: “users couldn’t find where to report their problems, and now it was just a click or two away from the home page.” This replaced the frustration of making a complaint, if the user could find out how to do so (it previously took six clicks to get there from the eBay home page).

His key conclusions about the benefits of IDR for ebay are:

the results … showed that, on average, users who reported a transaction problem and went through the online dispute resolution process increased their usage of the marketplace, regardless of outcome…

What that meant was that buyers who “won” their case increased their activity, but buyers who “lost” their case also increased their activity. Now it is true that the buyers who lost their case did increase their activity at a slower rate than the buyers who won their case, but most surprisingly, both of those buyers increased their activity more than buyers who never filed a dispute in the first place….

what this shows is that when a dispute arises, that is the loyalty moment for an online consumer. A transaction that goes smoothly does not drive a big uptick in future activity. But if a user has a problem, and that problem is resolved quickly and effectively, the next time that user sits down to buy something online, they will come back to the marketplace where they experienced a fast and fair resolution.