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Comcast Training Materials Leaked
WheezyJoe writes: The Verge reports on leaked training manuals from Comcast, which show how selling services is a required part of the job, even for employees doing tech support. The so-called "4S training material" explicitly states that 20 percent of a call center employee's rating for a given call is dependent on effectively selling the customer new Comcast services. "There are pages of materials on 'probing' customers to ferret out upsell opportunities, as well as on batting aside customer objections to being told they need to buy something. 'We can certainly look at other options, but you would lose which you mentioned was important to you,' the guide suggests clumsily saying to an angry customer who doesn't want to buy any more Comcast services." Images of the leaked documents are available on the Verge, making for fun reading.
... for pirating their upsell "do you want fries with that."
"Transparent" is a shit show that trades on every stereotype going. A man in drag is NOT a transsexual.
American companies are rabid, toxic predators. Don't deal with them if you can avoid it.
The grabbing hands, grab all they can...
Why is this a surprise? Or even 'newsworthy' on slashdot? This is just good business. When I go to a store, any store, they try and sell me more stuff. Ask me if I found everything I need. Have I tried this new brand of drink? When I have a meal in a restaurant they ask me if I want coffee or dessert. If you don't want it, just say no.
This is totally normal for ISPs. up-selling, attempts to retain customers at any cost. At comcast it was pressed on our call center tech support guys fairly hard but moreso on customer service reps in the billing/accounts department. at AT&T there was literally a whole department called "the save team" who got financial incentives to retain customers. if you called to cancel, you would be put on the line with the save team. they could get credit for a save if they could transfer a customer back to technical support "oh, our tech guys can fix that problem for you and your service will be fine, plus i gave you a month credit" (or something to that affect). and then the tech staff would get this transferred call about how their printer didnt work. completely unrelated, and after being bounced around and on hold, then being told "uhhh. we cant help you with that", they got right pissed and demanded to cancel again. the save team rep, already got a notch on their saved belt but the customer still quit. it was a corrupt system right to the core :)
I recently had to get my cable TV fixed, as the cable box wasn't syncing for more than a minute after being plugged in. After about six calls the "customer account executive" finally determined that I should bring the box in and swap it. During the last of these six calls, the rep asked me if I wanted to upgrade to 105 Mbps Internet. I told him my computers are too low-end to make good use of that, and when I see speed problems, it's usually on the other side. I forget what else I had to embellish my "no thanks" with to get him to back off.
T1 call center is a dead-end job that nobody does by choice. Who cares what the performance goals are, do they fire for not up selling? yes/no
It's when the customer rep. tries to empathize that pushes me over the edge, even if it's the beginning of the call. It makes it look like they are untrained.
I worked tech support for Time Warner about 5 years ago. We were not 'required' to sell, but we were most certainly pushed to. We were reminded constantly, and people who did sell a lot were praised while the rest of us got the 'why aren't you more like this guy?' treatment. Our calls were randomly selected for review, and if there wasn't 'sufficient' effort put into selling, we were criticized heavily. In these reviews, it seems selling was weighted more heavily than whether we actually solved the issue properly or according to procedure, since nobody really gave you guff for failing to satisfy a customer's tech needs as long as you didn't piss them off. You would think that sending onsite techs out to jobs that could have been solved over the phone would get you in trouble. But as long as you sell, sell, sell, you got a gold freakin star. You ever wonder why you are on hold for so long? Because techs are trying to sell shit after they fix the customer's problem instead of hanging up the damn phone and taking the next call. Multiply that by 30+ calls per tech, 3 or so minutes per call, and you see what a giant waste of time that is. I left that horrible job after six months. I spoke with one of my old coworkers who lasted a little longer than I did, and he said nearly half of the 'veteran' techs left shortly after I had, some of them quite spectacularly. ID badges were thrown, "fuck this sales bullshit" was heard often. These bloody companies have dedicated sales staff, why load down techs with this shit?
For fifty dollars more you can get out Ass Rape Plan
The only way to do business properly is to find out what people need and want and fulfill their expectations.
Comcast is a leach. I'm glad I never was in their service area and never needed their 'services'.
I thought that only happened with the aliens?
What type is the blood, and how do they get the organ and speakers compact enough to install in a call center?
Does anyone have a script a customer can stick to when dealing with Comcast?
If Slashdot were chemistry it would look like this:Cadaverine
UPS required internal techs to try upsell when they only would talk to internal employees...
Man was that place a hell hole.
I used to work for Fedex tech support - we were supposed to: - Have the call answered by the second ring - Not up sell anything - Be polite and courteous at all times - Troubleshoot anything that is wrong with the computer - the job started back in the day before all software had TCP/IP, and we had to dial in, Oh and Win95 was supported. - All our calls were to be logged and notes made for helping the next guy if they ever called in again. In the same building we had AT&T WorldNet, they had to: - Not answer unless the customer was on hold for at least 1/2 and hour - Priority was given to new customers setting up - When they closed for the night - all calls were left in Que and answered in the morning, if still there. For some reason AT&T always had openings?!?
Nothing of value was lost.
Someone moves to an area where Comcast is basically the only game in town for broadband, and at every step of their signing up for residential service, they have their lawyer in tow, reading and challenging everything. "Equipment rental, no, early termination fee, that's not going to work for us..."
.
Prisencolinensinainciusol. Ol Rait!
I spent 3 hours trying to just upgrade my TV service and being told repeatedly that my only option was the triple play package, after 4 or 5 phone calls and various web chat idiots I got someone to actually do it:
http://g0thicicecream.wordpress.com/2014/08/17/oh-woe-is-comcast-customer-service/
It would be news for nerds if someone would be kind enough to summarize what to say to get special discounts for internet service.
Don't waste your vote! Vote for whoever you want, unless you live in a swing state it won't matter anyways
I'm not surprised at this, it is par for the course for many telephone support agents. I used to do telephone support for Hewlett Packard, until they let me go because I couldn't meet the sales quotas. Not because customers disliked me, not because I couldn't fix customers pc's, but because I couldn't meet a goal of $80.00-$100.00 average revenue per call. Most companies treat their support departments as a revenue drain, since the price of support is no longer built into the purchase price of the item sold in the race to reach the cheapest prices to gain market share. In the case of Comcast, it's pure profit since they overcharge on the services anyway.
In my business, about 90% of customers who called to cancel ended up buying more, and leaving happy.
The difference is, we solve their problem, make them a HAPPY customer, THEN see what more we can offer that further meets their needs.
Here's a typical call:
Customer: I want to cancel. ... ...
Me: Sure, no problem. While I do that, I'm curious, is there something about the product that wasn't meeting your needs?
C: Your product doesn't do X.
Me: Oh, yes, that is important. Our product can actually do that for you, one second
[keyboard tapping]
Me: You're now configured for X, and the cool thing about the way we do X is
C: Oh, uhm, that's cool I guess.
Me: If you ever want to do X++, we can certainly do that for you too.
C: That's pretty cool. I never knew you could do that.
Me: Our product has a lot of features that aren't immediately obvious, so if there's ever anything you need, just let us know and we can probably help you.
C: Hidden features? Like what?
Me: Y, and Z are kind of handy. Come to think of it, since you said you want to do X, you might want to do ABC with that. Last week we just released an addon that does ABC.
C: Gee, I could really use ABC. How do I get that addon?
Their manual looks pretty reasonable - I think all of the complaints are about agents that don't follow the guidelines, which are pretty complicated.
And has been for decades. Every customer contact is a sales opportunity. EVERY contact.
After the dot com bust (the first one), I had bills to pay, so I ended up in a call center for the local cable company. It wasn't quite the low point of my life, but it was in the running.
The call center was brand new, and the high speed data side was briefly allowed to operate normally, but soon company politics pushed out the (technical) director, and replaced him with a MBA (and EEOC-bingo winner).
We were all trained to sell, instructed to sell on every call, and evaluated on selling. This was policy from day one, but widely ignored in my department until the MBA took over.
I earned a reputation for solving problems. Incompetent or uncaring employees would fail to fix things over and over again, pissing off customers. After months of continuing problems, they would call to yell. Usually, they'd end up getting more excuses and empty promises. Sometimes they'd get me (or one of a handful of other fixers).
I'd mute my microphone until they were done venting, then I'd figure out what the hell was wrong, and get it fixed, often with a generous service credit to appease them for the months that we'd dicked them around.
Over a few months, I solved hundreds of problems (some going back for many months or years), probably prevented at least a couple of suicides (monopoly, it was us or nothing) and maybe a mass shooting or two (yes, some of them really were that angry).
One thing I know for sure is that none of those problem calls wanted a fucking sales pitch. "Mr. Smith, now that I've fixed the problem that has prevented you from using the service that you've been paying for these last six months, and you've put your guns away, can I upsell you into a premium package?" Yeah, right. Maybe they'd be interested in an upgrade in a few months, after we'd re-established a bit of trust, but not right away.
One of my randomly selected evaluation calls happened to be one of my problem calls. The recording followed the call through our system, so it started with 20 minutes of him yelling at one of the sales girls, then her calling me in tears asking to transfer the call, then him yelling at me, then me figuring out the problem and fixing it, then him thanking me, almost in tears himself.
I had an awesome score on that call, but still failed the review because selling was mandatory. I told my supervisor that he'd better screen my review calls from then on because I had no intention of following the policy. He could either run interference for me and keep me around until one of my interviews panned out, or he could write me up for my second and third strikes as they came up.
I was gone before my next review came up, so I have no idea what he decided.
I kept in touch with some friends, and still lived in their service area. The call center went downhill from there. They switched to a voice attendant, so even the people that were happy when they dialed their phones were pissed off by the time they managed to talk to a human. I know I always was. (At first they had a backdoor, swearing three times would get you to a human quickly, but word got out and they disabled that feature.)
Moving to a non-monopoly town (three[!] fiber lines in my yard! 75 meg up/down for cheap!) was the wisest move of my internet life.
See that "Preview" button?
I've worked in the telephone tech support business for 10 years. I have performed tech support for fortune 500 companies you would instantly recognize.
towards the half-way point of my stint, upselling became a *required* part of the job, a metric on which your performance was measured.
First incentives were put in place to weed out those who didn't upsell: shift bids started being held every 90 days instead of "as the business needs dictated" with top sellers given first picks. This caused those who didn't sell to get terrible shifts, requiring many to quit due to life obligations.
Then those who failed to sell were given bad reviews, causing them to lose out on annual salary increases.
When I left poor sellers were being written up, put on notice, and eventually terminated.
Note, that positions these people were initially hired for were inbound technical support jobs with no mention of selling anything. These people would be manning the technical support lines for major corporations that you have heard of, and no one calling any of them would expect to be given any kind of sales pitch.
"We noticed you're reading slashdot, do you want to upgrade to Reddit? 4chan? We'll throw in a bunch of (dead (4chan special)) kittens as well! We'll harass you till you say yes..."
Comcast wil ljsut tel lthe terms are mom megotiable. Go monopolies, go! Free market and all. You are free to set up your own ISP and start competing.. or are you?
I have BOA try to sell me on a new credit card when I called to ask about a fraudulent charge on my current card, the lady tried to act like she was a friend trying to help me and just mention how great this card was and how I would love it before transfering me to someone that could help.
I find it makes the company look bad in my eyes when they do this, but I guess they do not care.
Your problem was that you had skills that you didn't monetize. If you could actually fix problems you didn't belong in a customer call center, you belonged in a much higher paid IT position.
I used to do tech support for Cox (by way of a outsourcer) and they started doing the same thing (this was about three years ago). The reason, straight from (Cox's) own mouths, was that customers were more trusting of the tech support agents than they were the sales department.
We (on the team) were quick to point out that we would be flushing that very credibility away if we started trying to sell people stuff, and it would make it more difficult to deal with the customers in our actual jobs as tech support then (folks would be less likely to follow directions, accept explanations for issues, etc).
If so, please include 20% upsell in your comments in this thread.
That's true, they have little reason to care about serving the customer. All that does is help them upsell to a more expensive package, voip, etc. There's no competition , due to legally enforced franchise monopolies.
Some people correctly point out that in a perfect world, with perfectly unselfish people, and people who all have identical preferences, it would be most efficient to have only one company providing lines to each home.
That's true of course. In a perfect world, it wouldn't make sense to have two cell towers covering the same area. It would be more efficient more Verizon to build towers in one state, Cricket to build towers in another state, and Cricket to cover a third state. Of course, people are not perfectly unselfish, and people do have preferences. Because Boost Mobile doesn't have a monopoly, because other companies have towers covering the same homes, Boost has to compete on price and service. It's not perfectly efficient, but it works much better than an "efficient" monopoly like cable.
Come to think of it, it's pretty inefficient to have two grocery stores right next to each other, Whole Foods and Walmart. It would be more efficient for one store to serve the neighborhood, getting rid of the duplication. Rather than arbitrarily allow one company to run the store, we could have the government run the store in each neighborhood. Like the USSR. It sounds stupid when you replace "cable service" with "cell phone service" or "grocery service", but the facts are the same- avoiding duplication would be more efficient. It only works well if people are perfect, though; perfectly competent, perfectly unselfish, and if people don't have different preferences.
I want a strong signal on my cable modem, so it is very reliable, and fast response to problems because I rely on my cable internet. For my phone, price is more important. Your preferences may be the opposite. That's fine, I can use Boost Mobile because they're cheap and in the same place you can whichever company gives you what you want.
I can't wait until Google fiber comes to town and the cable company has to start competing on speed, price, and service.
I used to work for Wells Fargo in customer service, NOT sales, and we had to constantly sell during the call... To the point that I was fired for not making sales quotas in my customer service position... That's how serious they take sales...
When I was at AOL doing tech support for dial up they made no secret that they wanted us to try and sell broadband to customers because customers trusted tech support more than sales. You would fail a call monitoring if you didn't at least ask them.
Overdoing it is not good business. If I decline the coffee, the waiter won't bother or harass me. If you start with "I have this problem, and don't try to sell me anything", will they comply? I go shopping now and then - and I don't go into the shops where thy bother me too much. I prefer the shops where I ask them when I need to, rather than they initiate conversations. If I can't have that, no sale. I won't mind the occational "may I help you", but they had better leave me alone when I turn them down once.
Similarly, I know people who don't vacation in Turkey because tourists are constantly harassed by locals selling stuff on the streets. It might 'work' for those street salesmen, but lots of tourists got to Greece instead. The same kind of sunny beaches, but the locals are nicely quiet.
And when I call tech support, it is because of a real fault, or at least issue so complicated that I couldn't figure it out by combining considerable skills with the information available through google. That is not a point in time where I'd consider a purchase! I want to discuss the problem, and have it solved.
When I want to buy products, I start by visiting webshops and websites. Big bonus if the website go straight to the full selection of products. Skipping bland company pages with almost no information. If they have "for investors", then they apparently need investors, not customers. If they display a few "featured products" with no easy way of getting to the rest - forget it. If they want to sell at every opportunity, start with a good homepage designed for just that. Except for webshops, surprisingly few does. And even the webshops mess it up sometimes - starting with "feature pages" instead of going straight to the shop section with all categories available. Have a feature/popular category if need be, but don't hide the main page behind another click. That click might not happen.
It seems to me that customer service should try to fix things that are broken rather than sell additional services delivered to a customer with a broken set up. Why would I want something new that requires a working system when I can't get what I'm paying for now with a broken system?
In a time of universal deceit, telling the truth is a revolutionary act. George Orwell
The thing is, that the company puts intense pressure on "customer service" or "tech support" to sell, when the customer only wants to fix a problem and they are unhappy. You can't upsell to these people unless you fix the problem, and 75% of the time, multiple contacts are necessary to fix problems. If the customer keeps hearing the same sales pitch without the problem being fixed, they're going to quit calling in to get a problem fixed and just switch to another service provider who's less obnoxious.
When ALL the ISP's in this case do the same thing, it frustrates people and that's when you get all the hate for companies showing up on social media, and that is a MUCH harder heard of cats to control.
Used to work for a large cable company as a repair technician. My job was threatened because my sale rate wasn't over 9%.
Lot of shady stuff happened because of this policy.
Very difficult to sell something to someone who is paying for a service that already isn't working.
"I donâ(TM)t want any of our employees to feel that pressure to go through and sellâ¦or [strong]feel[/strong] like theyâ(TM)re going to get fired," Tom Karinshak, Comcastâ(TM)s senior vice president of customer experience, tells The Verge. "Thatâ(TM)s not good for us."
We don't want our employees to "feel" like they'll be fired if they don't upsell aggressively. We want them to know it, be sure of it, fear it to the core of their beings. "Feeling" isn't sure enough. We want bone-deep certainty and visceral dread. We want our employees to completely understand that not selling in every breath and every moment of interaction with a customer is high treason, malfeasance, and heresy, and such dereliction of sacred duty will be treated with appropriate harshness.
Welcome to the Panopticon. Used to be a prison, now it's your home.
Interesting bit of the training material I found:
"Fuck you,"-- that's my name. You know why, mister? You drove a Hyundai to get here. I drove an eighty-thousand dollar BMW. THAT'S my name. And your name is "you're wanting." You can't play in the man's game, you can't close them - go home and tell your wife your troubles. Because only one thing counts in this life: Get them to sign on the line which is dotted. You hear me, assholes? ABC. A, always. B, be. C, closing. Always Be Closing. Always Be Closing!
https://www.eff.org/https-everywhere
Barb's using her sockpuppets to minus mod you as usual since she messed up again.
Oh wow, it's the frothingly-insane hosts file obsessed guy! You're still around! I haven't been by /. much the last few years, but this is like seeing an old, rambling, combative, monomaniacal friend, of sorts.
Hey, it's an APK sockpuppet, which doesn't really count as a sockpuppet, because everything APK posts is AC. Stop trying to pretend you have supporters here, by posting without your APK sig.
Maybe if you weren't such an abusive asshole, you wouldn't get karmaslammed into oblivion, and you'd actually be able to use a real account, instead of your AC crap.
It doesn't matter if what you say is true or not (and I'm not saying it is completely, even though you do have some legit points at times), but when you present your points like a maniacal raving psychotic, it doesn't matter. You're branded an asshole from the beginning, and rightly so.
"City hall" in German is "Rathaus" Kinda explains a few things......
I worked for 11 years as a line technician for a mid size cable company, during that time the field teams were trained in sales but never mentioned after training. I left that company and after a couple of years decided to go into customer service for Charter. their metrics are the same 20% of your call is attempting to upsell. Nowhere in the manual does it explain how to upsell to a user is screaming "You cut off my f*ck!ng Monday Night Football" or "I want my f*ck!ng porn g0dd@mn!t" After a few weeks and carrying a bottle of antacid tablets in my bag and several 80% scores on my metrics (conveniently the minimum passing is 85%) I decided to leave and go back into the IT field. Oh another jewel that most customers don't know....every call is recorded and probably half are reviewed every day, but you will never get your hands on that recording, intellectual property of Charter.
"If stupid things work...then they are not stupid."