Etsy now provides a customer support chatbot which uses artificial intelligence, or AI, to provide you with more efficient and timely customer support.
How does the chatbot answer questions?
The customer support chatbot is designed to quickly resolve the most common questions Etsy members have, such as:
- How to resolve delivery issues
- How to address shop listing issues
- How to resolve a case from a buyer
- How to get help with issuing a refund
- How to resolve order and account issues
When you select the category relevant to your question, such as refunds, the chatbot will scan all relevant Etsy Help Center articles and similar materials to provide you with a response.
How does the chatbot manage personal information?
To provide the customer support chatbot, we work with a service provider called Ultimate. Ultimate only uses your data on Etsy’s behalf to provide the chatbot.
You don’t need to enter any personal data to interact with the chatbot. The chatbot automatically categorizes customer questions into topics such as payments, returns, refunds, or delivery status. However, for certain escalated issues, we may ask for information to authenticate your account before transferring you to a human to assist.
If you do enter personal information in your interactions with the chatbot (such as your name and address), that information may be stored and/or used by the service. However, no response from the chatbot generated by AI will contain any personal information you enter.
Etsy has taken steps to preserve your privacy in case you input personal data. Certain direct identifiers associated with you are masked, such as your email address. Such information will be obscured and replaced with generic text. For example, if yourname@etsy.com is entered, it would be replaced with [Email].
Customer support chats are used to “train” the chatbot to improve its ability to learn information. Since these chats go through the privacy preserving steps discussed above, they normally won’t contain much, if any, of your personal data.
If you’re a resident of the United States or Canada, we may rely on your consent where we process your data with the chatbot.
Please see our Privacy Policy for more information on:
- Why and how we use your information
- Your rights related to correction, access, deletion, or objecting to your personal data being used for chatbot training purposes
What if I still have questions?
In certain countries, you may have the right to raise privacy-related questions or complaints regarding the processing of personal information in connection with this chatbot. If you have additional questions:
- Select Contact Support below to get in touch with our support team.
- Send an email to Etsy's Data Protection Officer at dpo@etsy.com.
- Write to us at the contact details outlined in our Privacy Policy.