The infamous Bill Cobb email, and the terrible issues it caused with Customer Support.

Some of you will remember the Feb 2005 email from Bill Cobb.

For those that don't, he ended it with the following:

"eBay has never stopped listening to our users and we never will. I know many of you already have Meg's e-mail address and frequently send her messages about things you care about. I hope you will do the same with me. My e-mail address is billcobb@ebay.com. I promise I'll read every e-mail. And most of all, I'll listen.

Sincerely,

Bill Cobb President eBay North America "

Bill Cobb was one of the worst things that ever happened to eBay, and this email pretty much summed up his complete lack of understanding of what eBay was about.

Immediately after sending this email out, his inbox was FLOODED with messages. Tens of thousands of messages. And this created an immediate problem. Clearly Bill Cobb couldn't really read all of these messages. In fact, many questioned if he could read at all.

So, this is what happened. One of the major CS centers in North America was directed to handle the volume. First, the entire QA (quality assurance) team was taken away from their tasks of making sure that the reps were doing their jobs properly, and they were tasked with answering what became known as the Cobb queue.

Not only did this take away the QA for the center, they were instructed that they could not use any of the pre-formatted email replies that existed in the database. And, they were given carte blanche to take whatever time was required to answer all of the concerns in an email.

It quickly became apparent that the QA team couldn't deal with the volume, nor did they have enough knowledge of the various issues to properly answer these concerns. So, more reps were drafted into answering these emails. Now keep in mind, a large number of these emails were about issues that had happened YEARS before, issues that couldn't even be dealt with anymore, but, because Bill had promised, they all got replied to. Naturally, with the caveat that they were being answered "on behalf of Bill Cobb".

So, for the first month or so, a lot of overtime was offered to help deal with the normal emails queues, which had naturally become slightly backlogged. This worked alright for a bit, then, with the 1st quarter coming to a close, all overtime was stopped. Which meant that because the Cobb emails were the #1 priority, many important email queues were allowed to backlog. Queues like the Banned Items reports, which quickly ended up more than a month behind. A queue which dealt with user reports of stuff like guns and drugs and other bad things not allowed on the site. Great idea Bill!

Myself being appalled at the idiocy, I sent an email to the internal eBay sites "Ask an Exec" feature, asking why overtime had been cut off when such important queues were being ignored, and such things as listings for guns were being ignored. Naturally, this created a massive shitstorm, because the person in charge of dealing with those emails forwarded it to every single executive in the company. My supervisor got crapped on, as did I. However, many Supervisors would say that off the record, they thought the Cobb email was a complete mistake.

Amazingly, this queue continued on for a long time. And at first, because the answers had to be free-handed, there were no metrics or stats kept for the reps working them. And reps, when given a license to waste as much time as possible without getting in trouble for it, took all the time they could. Not to mention that the overall quality of CS dropped because there was no more QA team to monitor the work being done!

Yes, this was Bill Cobb at his very worst. A man who had no clue what he was doing. Yet, he walked away from eBay with millions of dollars from his stock options.