I was also wondering this. It almost seemed to me like there were trying to get me to call back and cancel at a different time, thereby passing the buck to the next employee.
Do they penalized when someone cancels?
My brother worked at a call center doing collections for credit cards. They tracked stats for everything. You didn't neccessarily get penalized but your performance was measured based on a wide number of stats. He found it the most interesting part of his otherwise horrible job.
They tracked length of call, calls per hour, dollars collected, % of outstanding debt collected, and a bunch of other things. These were than combined into scores. Each category has bench marks that you were supposed to hit.
1) That caller has the patience of a saint, I've have blown a gasket around the 3rd time he said "you don't want the fastest internet service?"
2) What pressure are those sales people under to keep customers from cancelling? Some of his sighs and frustrated grunts along the way sounded really desperate. Like "if I lose another customer today I'm out of here" kind of desperate.
Quote:
Originally Posted by Huntingwhale
That guy was way to nice. This happened to me when I cancelled my credit card a couple years ago and it took all me telling the guy off harshly for 30 seconds before I got what I wanted.
Keep in mind, this guy obviously set this up to be a viral thing, so the "patience" was just part of getting the desired result. If he lost it and was being extremely rude the guy probably would have caved earlier.
To this day I still hate Bell with an evil fury for the crap they pulled when I canceled to move to Italy. F'n lying thieves. I'll go to the grave never giving them another cent.
To this day I still hate Bell with an evil fury for the crap they pulled when I canceled to move to Italy. F'n lying thieves. I'll go to the grave never giving them another cent.
You have peaked my curiosity, what did they do if you don't mind me asking?
To this day I still hate Bell with an evil fury for the crap they pulled when I canceled to move to Italy. F'n lying thieves. I'll go to the grave never giving them another cent.
Telus is on my "never another cent" list. When I had them for home internet they got into the habit of mailing me modems I didn't ask for, then billing me $150+ each time. One time I even refused the delivery at the post office and they still tacked the $150 onto my bill.
The only way to get the charge removed was to call them after the fact with a postal receipt saying it had been sent back to them.
Each time I called to say "hey, I never asked for this modem, I'm not buying it from you and I never even took it home" they would reply "ok sir, please just pay the amount of your bill and we can credit you for the excess amount at a later date"
As people guessed, the Comcast pay structure promotes this type of call.
Quote:
In other words, the incentive structure is really about punishment. Reps start out the month with a full commission, but every canceled product deducts from that amount. Once reps fall below a certain threshold, they get no commission at all. That means a rep could get all the way to the second-to-last day of the pay period only to have a customer cancel four products. Suddenly the rep is below her goal, losing $800 to $1,000 off her paycheck.
__________________
"The problem with any ideology is that it gives the answer before you look at the evidence."
—Bill Clinton
"The greatest obstacle to discovery is not ignorance--it is the illusion of knowledge."
—Daniel J. Boorstin, historian, former Librarian of Congress
"But the Senator, while insisting he was not intoxicated, could not explain his nudity"
—WKRP in Cincinatti
Yeah, I was listening to that call, and before even reading about their pay plan structure, I could just hear the desperation for this guy to retain the customer to not be docked pay. I am all for straight commission pay plans, where you get paid for what you sell, but reverse commission structures should be illegal. I cannot imagine the amount of stress this would cause when you have bills to pay. There are so many variables. What if the contract holder died, and a family member had to call in to cancel the contract? Is it fair to dock the guys pay for not being able to retain a dead client? What if the installer knocked over and shattered a family heirloom while he was in the house? There are certain customers you will never be able to retain.
It isn't rep that should be lambasted here, it is the cable company, for having a brutally stressful pay plan in place that creates a monster like we heard in the call. For all we know, losing that client could have cost that guy $500 and been the difference between him being able to pay his rent or not.
