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Bad PC Sales Staff Exposed
Barence writes "An undercover investigation has revealed how Dell's online sales staff take liberties with the truth when trying to sell customers new PCs. One member of staff told an undercover reporter that he would need a PC with a good graphics card to download digital photos. Another, who was more incompetent than devious, was asked how many photos could be stored on a 250GB hard disk. 'Its[sic] on average 2 MB then 1024 MB * 2,' came the bewildering reply. Meanwhile, a sales assistant at supermarket Tesco told the reporter that netbooks got their name because 'a Japanese man on a plane fell asleep with a laptop on his thighs and was horribly burned, so the industry has dropped the name laptop.'"
The tesco one isn't so bad in fairness. The rep could well have been thinking of NOTEbook - rather than NETbook. To be honest I thought that was the reason why PC makers no longer refer to laptops as laptops, but instead notebooks - so there was no implicit liability with someone burning their special parts from keeping a hot laptop in lap.
And of course like a noob I just read the article and indeed that is what happened - the rep thought notebook - and the article takes a shot at the rep for saying a netbook is: "They're just small notebooks without word processors."
So now im really pissed at giving pcpro a page click.
As we're speaking, I'm working on a laptop from a lady who came from Best Buy. The "Geek Squad" claimed that she had a failing hard drive, and that she would need to buy a new one, as well as a Windows Vista install. The only symptom was "My laptop is running slow"
One pass of Malwarebytes, thirty minutes later, a S.M.A.R.T. check, the machine is performing properly.
The trolls even left their stupid "GeekSquad" system checking software on my customer's machine. I checked the logs of the program, no found errors.
People disgust me.
The mobile section is actually only half Best Buy, and half Carphone Warehouse. They work on a different bonus structure and different power structure than the rest of the store, which the Mobile Manager reporting directly to a district manager and skipping the General Manager of the store, unlike every other dept.
Best Buy's sales staff are not paid on commission, as far as I'm aware.
A bit of a different field, but I know that whenever I am at Best Buy to pick up anything home theater related (I help out a lot of friends/relatives with HT setups) I will inevitably end up arguing with some moron trying to sell me a $140 Monster Cable so it will 'look better'. Being ignorant/a liar is one thing, but it is totally something else when they continue to argue with you about it. I have even, on one particular occasion, taken the time to explain to the clown how digital audio/video works and why purchasing the "better" cable is equivalent to lighting your money on fire, and had him still come back with, "Well, I'm sorry but you're wrong, this cable will make it look better." It is amazing to me that this sort of criminal fraud is tolerated -- these people get away with making provably false statements in order to separate people from their money and they don't see any consequences. The average person should be able to walk into a store and at least be confident that the person trying to sell them things will, at the very least, not blatantly lie, but this is not the case.
To the haters: You can't win. If you mod me down, I shall become more powerful than you could possibly imagine
WTF are you talking about? That's absolutely NOT true. All versions of MS OfficeXP and 2003 are listed on the Vista compatibility pages :
https://www.microsoft.com/windows/compatibility/Browse.aspx?type=Software&category=Business%20%26%20Home%20Office&subcategory=Office%20Suites&page=2
Perhaps you should either do some research or work for Dell.
I don't mean this to be advertisement, but considering that the typical retail store and most American businesses for that matter treat the customer as some sort of nuisance, I'd like to give some good words to a company that, so far, has been treating me right. Note, as soon as they slip up I'll be the first to slam them.
Disclaimer: This is a sample of one person dealing with one store with about a dozen purchases.
It's NOT me! It's the meds! I'm on 1000mg of Fukitol.
You mean like the Rocketfish toslink cable with 24k gold plated connectors..
Yeah, they have those too:
http://www.bestbuy.com/site/olspage.jsp?skuId=7832223&type=product&id=1142297086861
"24K gold-plated connectors for corrosion resistance and enhanced signal transfer"
Brilliant.
-Matt
I used to work for Circuit City (right until they closed their doors), and our sales guys didn't make commission either. But they did have to meet certain quotas to keep their job, and in some ways, the quota frequently changed.
Corporate would send in "budgets" each morning for each department, listing goals for the sales guys. The budget was a certain gross dollar amount, but the focus was always on things like extended warranties ("City Advantage"), services ("Firedog"), and peripherals (USB cables, anti-adware, etc). In addition to meeting the budget, which was a department-wide goal, a large percentage of your personal sales numbers had to be those three things. (I believe the minimum for City Advantage was 20% and Firedog was 10%, but I could be off.) They told us the reason for this was the company priced computers so low that we actually lost money on each sale, so we had to make it up by selling the services and such, which were basically pure profit. (It was probably the same deal with TVs, but the HE department was regarded as an elite group since TVs were the big moneymaker for CC, so they usually kept their briefings and meetings separate from the rest of the group.) A monthly list was displayed in the break room and behind the front desk, breaking down the numbers and ranking each salesperson. The guys in the red knew they were about to lose their jobs, so they would try to step up their game before the next month's numbers would come out. (It was also not uncommon for the managers to have patronizing or angry closed-door "meetings" with the salespeople who didn't sell quite enough of one of the Big 3. We had a very high turnover rate, and this is partially why.)
In addition to this "incentive", some vendors would occasionally have contests and rewards for employees who sold certain items and packages. For example, about a year ago, Microsoft had a contest: whoever sold the most Zunes (company wide) would get a cash prize, and their store would get a party. Vendors like HP and Bose would regularly credit employees with "Rewards Points" for selling certain promoted items, which could be redeemed on CC's employee rewards site for things like giftcards and cologne.
And for the record, most of our sales guys were high-school kids who knew very little about computers; all of their knowledge was based on watered-down e-Learnings that filled their minds with platitudes and corporate double-think. Firedog technicians were usually an exception, but not always, and the few guys who did know what they were talking about didn't last, because they were horrible with customers. The guys who stayed the longest and moved ahead in the company were not the knowledgeable ones; it was the guys who sold the most warranties and installs, and it didn't matter if they were dishonest about it, or if the customer even knew it had been tacked on to their receipt. (In fact, this latter practice was encouraged off-the-record by management.)
I worked sales briefly, but quickly moved to a different job so I didn't have to lie to customers and worry about the quotas. I still got to help people with questions, which was great, but management didn't really care what my sales numbers were, so I was happy.