Up until about 6-9 months ago, a friend of mine working for a internet/telco company (which shall remain nameless so my friend doesn't loose his job) was doing regular internet tech support just like you'd find at any quality ISP. However, now the company has told the technical support people that they must now not only do their regular jobs, but they must now also offer and try to upsell 100% of all customers they talk to. The biggest push is to try to upsell them on phone service, but they're also trying to get the other technical support reps to upsell other company products as well, many of which are totally unrelated to Technical support at all.
I can understand them maybe "ASKING" the reps to recommend things like their spam filter service or the virus scanning service to customers "where and when applicable" and make it voluntary. However they have totally forced the reps to try to upsell every service possible on every single call!! :disgust::|
To me this is a job for Customer Service, not technical support. I for one don't want to be calling in saying that "Hey, I need your DNS servers" and have the rep go into a long deal about "You really need our phone service, and you should have our specialized virus and spam protection! Oh wait, we've got a new family friendly service too!!" That's just crude and unneeded. If a company can't sell its products via normal channels, that ought to say something about the company. Everyone, or at least a good majority of the people working for the company in question all agree that the company sucks and so do its products. And yes, I was using the quality ISP as a reference, not as a description of them. They're anything but that.
They also agree that 90% or better of the issues have been caused by upper management and that the company is in a bad enough straits that it will be seeing bankruptsy court soon enough. The part that's even worse is the upper management is blaming its screwups on all the underlings and trying to force them to fix management's impotence and stupidity. *sigh* Ok, I'm done ranting. I just think all of this is stupid. I mean seriously, who wants to have to deal with a sales pitch when all you're trying to do is get technical information or get your problem with your computer fixed? I sure as heck don't. Sales, marketing, and pitching of products should be left for Marketing and Customer Service. If the company is failing even though all the people under them are doing their best, then the company needs to go under. Either that or the upper management needs to get fired.
Personally, I'd love to see this company succeed. Just not in this form. It used to be good. Then the current management showed up and things royally went to h3ll in a hand basket. Ok, I'm done ranting. Let me know if you agree with my rant or not. But either way I'm done. :frown:
I can understand them maybe "ASKING" the reps to recommend things like their spam filter service or the virus scanning service to customers "where and when applicable" and make it voluntary. However they have totally forced the reps to try to upsell every service possible on every single call!! :disgust::|
To me this is a job for Customer Service, not technical support. I for one don't want to be calling in saying that "Hey, I need your DNS servers" and have the rep go into a long deal about "You really need our phone service, and you should have our specialized virus and spam protection! Oh wait, we've got a new family friendly service too!!" That's just crude and unneeded. If a company can't sell its products via normal channels, that ought to say something about the company. Everyone, or at least a good majority of the people working for the company in question all agree that the company sucks and so do its products. And yes, I was using the quality ISP as a reference, not as a description of them. They're anything but that.
They also agree that 90% or better of the issues have been caused by upper management and that the company is in a bad enough straits that it will be seeing bankruptsy court soon enough. The part that's even worse is the upper management is blaming its screwups on all the underlings and trying to force them to fix management's impotence and stupidity. *sigh* Ok, I'm done ranting. I just think all of this is stupid. I mean seriously, who wants to have to deal with a sales pitch when all you're trying to do is get technical information or get your problem with your computer fixed? I sure as heck don't. Sales, marketing, and pitching of products should be left for Marketing and Customer Service. If the company is failing even though all the people under them are doing their best, then the company needs to go under. Either that or the upper management needs to get fired.
Personally, I'd love to see this company succeed. Just not in this form. It used to be good. Then the current management showed up and things royally went to h3ll in a hand basket. Ok, I'm done ranting. Let me know if you agree with my rant or not. But either way I'm done. :frown:
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