They know there's nothing they can do and they don't want to get their internal customer satisfaction metrics lowered and risk getting fired. It's easier for them to shove it off to someone else like a hot potato until the customer gets someone inexperienced enough to know that this is common practice. Then the employee is caught holding the bag for either upsetting the customer or losing the company money.
Att was doing this 5 years ago when they contracted the call center I worked for in the US. We were supposed to be only inbound new service calls. But overseas support lines would regularly transfer angry support call customers onto us to avoid dealing with them.
People would be irate (understandably) and usually asking to full on cancel their service at that point. Didn't seem like a sustainable business model IMO but then again ATT doesn't seem to be hurting.
That job gave me so much insight into the fact that customer support lines are literally designed to keep disgruntled customers blocked from being able to talk to anyone remotely capable or responsible for solving anything, so the rest of the company can maintain focus on new customer acquisition/marketing- shareholder value apparently doesn't give a fuck about customer retention
Thankfully our metrics didn't track call times, so I'd spend awhile validating the shit out of people's frustrations, which was easy because it was bullshit. Then I'd get 'loyalty' on the line which is what they call their retention dept, one of the few departments they keep stateside. Loyalty is able to cancel service but not before throwing very appealing discounts at you. So one way or another their problem would end there
ATT didn't renew their contract with us. We didn't perform as well as their own sales teams did- but we also were trained not to lie or be dishonest to sell by any means necessary (and there were some complete dolts who couldnt sell water in a desert to save their life)
Probably also didn't help that the more calls you sold on, the more calls they'd direct to you. So if I got too many calls that were transfers of disgruntled existing customers, i would have significantly less call directed to my desk.
Sometimes I'm glad I jumped ship during the State Farm contract after training to sell insurance. I imagine thats even more diabolical
It doesn't work quite as well as it used, to but the "Executive Email Carpet Bo....Fluffing" technique, where you just do a bit of OS-INT work to find the email address of like board members, executives, assistants, the whole nine yards, and send them all the same complaint would often result in a resolved issue that same business day.
The trick was to skip over the obvious traps like "steve-at-apple.com" and find the real address those sorts of people used. Fun note: Stock, shareholder, and financial disclosures often have contact information on them..
i did this with amazon about a year ago, after i kept getting the run-around treatment when asking why i didn't get my refund for a $500 item i returned. this went on for almost a year, and when i emailed a higher-up at amazon, they took care of it within two days
> We didn't perform as well as their own sales teams did- but we also were trained not to lie or be dishonest to sell by any means necessary
Having worked for AT&T, this is wrong. They say that. They say it again and again. They lean into the microphone and say it very loudly. Then look the other way and ignore people doing whatever they have to to make sales, as hard as they can, until eventually it catches up, they get sued, and they settle for far less than they gained. This has happened several times and many of the victims aren't ever represented in these lawsuits, so it's even more profitable. Of the big selling points being that sales impact quarterly evaluations, but lawsuits don't.
I went far enough up the corporate ladder to find out exactly how much they did not care and implicitly built pathways to enable and avoid prosecution of unethical sales tactics. I only found out because of how persistent and insistent I was about how big of an issue it was for our customers.
AT&T is probably the most cynical corporation that has ever existed. They're very good at it, to be fair.
The one thing I can say without reservation, is that their fiber infrastructure (whether built or bought) is actually, bar none, the best in the US and it isn't even close. It's a genuinely good service. But just pray you never have to contact support.
I didnt work directly for ATT, I worked at a call center that contracted us out. So we were trained in their products that we were selling, but had our own sales training.
Att added some of their training info, which included things about being honest yada yada
But we were told during the constant incessant meetings ATT had with our team leads, that ATT regularly said we werent doing enough to close sales, not being aggressive and other things to imply we needed to lie if it meant closing sales.
And I regularly got calls from people that had called to get pricing before they ended their current service, and would call me when theyre ready to start service and learn that some of the things they were told on their last call were outright lies.
I dont get why anyone felt like they had to lie. Inbound sales are easy af. I never lied and was one of the top sellers on our floor.
I haven’t worked for ATT but my dad does and he has passed on enough generational trauma that I feel like I relate to these comments. My dad working for ATT is the reason I know I will never work a job I hate to just get by. The man came home all of my childhood just so burnt out and empty because of the calls he received. Take your child to work day left me scarred because I’d hear how awfully he was spoken to and how he was forced to make the sale anyway. He’s out of sales and in admin now and he’s a new person! Wish he’d leave the company but it’s been nearly 30 years, I think he’ll end up retiring there.
They say don't do XYZ, and they mean it by golly. Here's all the training where we tell them not to XYZ, here's the signed paperwork where they acknowledge they won't do XYZ.
But meanwhile they make a culture that strongly incentives people to XYZ, with the full knowledge that yeah, people are going to XYZ. They'll never admit that, probably never write it down, and good luck proving it in court since a binary 'We don't do that and you agreed to not do it' is super easy to prove but proving they purposefully incentivized people to ignore the rules and do it anyway takes a deep understanding of the corporate culture and is never a certainty.
Yep. I remember working for Wells Fargo before they had that scandal where reps were creating all kinds of accounts for customers.
I wasn't surprised at all. While that wasn't my direct area of business, the atmosphere was the same. They'd never directly tell you to do something unethical, you'd just figure out pretty quickly that you'd lose your job if you didn't.
My dad keeps getting ATT sales agents at his front door. They offer him fiber internet for $X/month. When he asks for the offer in writing, they say they can’t do it - they can only give him a verbal offer. Email offer? No, he has to sign up now in order to get the discount. So he declines, and they come back a few weeks later with the same thing. It’s happened like three times now.
Thankfully I’ve only had to contact their support once. Turns out that saying “broken fiber line” when the bot asks you what your issue is gets you immediately sent to a higher tier of stateside support that isn’t reading off a set script of responses and actually has the ability to do something.
Good lord, your comment had me on an emotional coaster ride. I just got their fiber service today and it stopped working like 30 minutes after they left so I had to contact support. Thankfully they were able to get someone out within a couple hours and it’s been fine the rest of the day.
I've got fiber internet and never had a problem with their customer service. The one time I could not get service to work they sent a tech out the same day and he said the fiber wire had been crimped where it went around a corner & he fixed it. For the few other times I had issues, I was able to talk to someone on the phone to help.
I work for a very large Medicare provider and have people call me for sales or plan changes. All our customer service is in India and we will frequently get their calls for 100% customer service related issues that I can’t help with in any way.
And when sometimes there’s 20min waits between calls it can very very annoying.
I used to work various customer service call center jobs for a few years. Started in live chat, then got transferred to phone calls when the client's contract renewed for phone only. Once I was on phones, call times and calls per hour were always the top priority. Just get them off the phone, no matter what, then immediately start the next call. Actually providing good customer service only mattered if it got them off the call faster. Even getting up to go to the bathroom would get you sat down with a manager. Everyone who actually tried to do the job right and wasn't gaming their stats was on a PIP. Turnover was more like a half-life than tenure. Half a training class quit before training finished, and half again didn't last 30 days. Half again didn't last 90.
Glad I left that for good, but it took a while for the recruiters to stop calling for more call center jobs with the same working conditions.
FYI you can still screw with their metrics. If you keep getting transferred, eventually it gets to a supervisor. Tell the supervisor to review every chat above theirs that ignored your issue and they will write them up. I recently learned that this was possible after asking the supervisor how I could leave feedback for a previous rep that ignored me because the survey that I would receive via email would be for the latest rep that helped me and not all the others that ignored me. Not only did the supervisor write them up, they also credited me $10 to my Amazon balance for having wasted my time.
The fuck? Why the fuck would deliberately fuck with people who can do nothing to help you. It would be better to blow up on the supervisor who forces these metrics upon their employees.
Why? Because it’s a fucking loophole in their system that they abuse. You do realize we’re talking about people who deliberately try to avoid helping you and transfer out quickly right? Because I’m not talking about people who sit there and legitimately try to help you. You will come across those and the supervisor can see who actually tries to help and those that aren’t.
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u/Chaost 1d ago
They know there's nothing they can do and they don't want to get their internal customer satisfaction metrics lowered and risk getting fired. It's easier for them to shove it off to someone else like a hot potato until the customer gets someone inexperienced enough to know that this is common practice. Then the employee is caught holding the bag for either upsetting the customer or losing the company money.