TLDR: Picked up a job as an outbound cold calling agents, selling to new customers buying new houses. It was fairly straight forward and easy. Fast forward to February, I'm now forced into doing the role of a retentions agents who has to deal with disgruntled existing customers who have been problems with their services and want to disconnect and I was to kiss up to them and prevent that from happening otherwise I get it trouble for it. Oh and I still get measured and compensated based on my old role which makes no sense because I'm barely doing that now
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I picked up a job last year at a fairly large telecom company as an outbound sales rep. The job's role seemed interesting as essentially we would be working with homebuilders and apartment buildings to reach out to residents who would be moving into their new homes and help them get some services set up. So technically it was cold calling but those residents were aware someone would be calling with some offers to help the set up home network services. The leads were also pretty easy to close since some of the promos involved offering them 2 years of internet for free, or some VERY steep discounts not available on our site, 1mths credits, etc.
The department had its ups and downs for sure, but things did start to really pick up for us in the fall and winter last year, and I was easily over achieving my targets with a great commission pay out. I had even started this texting initiative where we instead of calling I'd text some customers and this was a nice chill way to reach out to people rather than mindlessly working through a dialer or excel sheet. Thing with outbound cold calling is that, its really easy to have dead days because people nowadays aren't picking up their phones. So there's been many days where its been nothing but voicemails and hang ups for me and that's made feel very lethargic some days. But it is what it is. This role is work from home so that has really helped relieve some of the stress where I didn't constantly have someone breathing down my neck.
Anyways fast forward to February and we were told that now we're going to start helping out our retentions department because they're understaffed. uh ok, like why not just hire more retentions agents then who are interested in doing that job? Retentions fucking sucks, its leads with customers who had all kinds of issues, from poor service, costs, and people wanting to disconnect their service and its our job to do everything to save them. Thing is I'm not a pushy or persistent person, I hate having to deal with irate customers and that now I have to spend my whole day pampering them. This is not the role I fucking interviewed for god damnit.
On top of that the vast majority of our actual leads that we were originally working on are being handled by a different department now and there less and less of it in our dialers but more retentions stuff. Yet I'm not being compensated for having to save retention customers and I'm still measured on how many new customers I've sold to (eg homebuilders). I didn't meet my target last month and I sure as hell am not going to meet it this month. If I don't get commission, the pay fucking sucks, its huge portion of how I make ends meet.
I've talked to my manager about this and I was basically told that “things are just slow and this is the way things are going to be for the next few months, can't really do much about it, orders from above”
We're also having other supervisors now doing more call listening, and the micro managing has started now Where I'm being told about how I didn't ask this or ask that, how I could have saved this customer. Like I don't give a fuck, if someone wants to disconnect their service, I'll fucking let them, I'm not going to kiss up to them.
At this point now every time I dial a number I just pray they don't pick up/it goes to voicemail. I'm highly considering just handing in my 2 weeks come Monday.