Guy Tries To Cancel Comcast

[ShiftyDevil]

So a little insight into this. One of things my company does is large call centers, we almost exclusively do higher tiers of tech support, but we do a bit of customer care which means we've done a tiny bit of retention work through our centers, but it's not full blown customer retention departments. There's a reason my company doesn't want to touch those (besides us selling our selves as way more tech heavy and offering value through analytics of problem trends), its because retention is the worst fucking environment that exists in the support world.

I can almost guarantee you this rep, as soon as he detected the customer wanted to cancel no matter what, had one of two goals; frustrate the caller into hanging up on him, or frustrate the caller into getting abusive so the rep could hang up on him. The reason they do this is that all retention centers grade their reps on their save rate. Many, many companies base rep pay on retention rate, there are a bunch that will dock your base hourly rate if you fall below certain save rates, I've heard of some as bad as falling below saving 90% of customers costing a few bucks an hour. A 90% save rate is basically impossible.

To mitigate that horrible policy reps working in retention have to use every tool in their book, including shady crap like getting customers to hang up, not closing the account even though they said they did (hey there was a glitch in the system man!), or what happened to me. A few months ago my credit card expired and my banking institution sent me a new one. A couple weeks after I got my new card I got a call from Frontier (they took over a bunch of Verizon FiOS's territory in my area) telling me my card expired and they needed to update it.

"What the ****, I cancelled my account with your over a year and a half ago" I said, I then proceeded to furiously go through my bank records while the guy on the phone tried to get me to give him my new card's details. After sitting on the phone for 30 minutes with these yahoos they figured out what happened was that my account was never cancelled the person just took all the services off it and left the son of a ***** open. Thankfully I wasn't getting charged anything, the damage was just an annoying waste of my time.

I don't know what it is with ISPs and cable companies, but they're just the fucking worst.

 

[nvanprooyen]

Thanks for the insight, that's actually pretty interesting.

 

[ShiftyDevil]

Thanks for the insight, that's actually pretty interesting.

Yeah, companies started going with pay based on retention rate instead of just firing people who are below a certain level. The churn rate for retention departments is already through the roof, it's better to give the illusion that you can make OK pay to try to keep people. They'll do things like say the pay rate is $14 an hour, which for doing customer care is pretty damn high.

Well once they get you in there you find out that's the max pay, and you get that if your save rate is 90% or above, and if you fall below that then your pay for that period is $13/hour, and if you fall below 80% your pay drops again, etc. They stack the percentage requirements so they, on average, pay employees what they ACTUALLY want to, not the inflated "advertised" rate. It's a really shitty way to treat employees, but, at the same time, if you're a consumer it's not on you to keep paying a company you don't want service from because you feel bad for how shittily employees are treated.

EDIT: When I say churn I mean employee retention. People burn out real fast trying to keep customers that just want to leave.

 

[Iwritecode]

Many years ago my wife worked at call center for like 3 days. She said it was horrible. Mostly HS kids running the place and you spend the day on the phone listening to people yell at you.

 

[Scoot26]

Yeah, companies started going with pay based on retention rate instead of just firing people who are below a certain level. The churn rate for retention departments is already through the roof, it's better to give the illusion that you can make OK pay to try to keep people. They'll do things like say the pay rate is $14 an hour, which for doing customer care is pretty damn high.

Well once they get you in there you find out that's the max pay, and you get that if your save rate is 90% or above, and if you fall below that then your pay for that period is $13/hour, and if you fall below 80% your pay drops again, etc. They stack the percentage requirements so they, on average, pay employees what they ACTUALLY want to, not the inflated "advertised" rate. It's a really shitty way to treat employees, but, at the same time, if you're a consumer it's not on you to keep paying a company you don't want service from because you feel bad for how shittily employees are treated.

EDIT: When I say churn I mean employee retention. People burn out real fast trying to keep customers that just want to leave.

Reminds me of health insurance companies that would pay their employees based on how many claims they could deny to people who needed care.