For a few months out of this past year, I've had the extreme (dis)pleasure of working for a call center that sold internet on behalf of HughesNet. Over that period of time, I acquired multiple pieces of evidence showing shady business practices exercised and recommended by my employer. This is just one. It's worth noting that these supervisors act as direct management to and coach every sales associate on their respective teams. Their recommended practices are often directly implemented by their team-members in an effort to earn more commission.
Members of management also used their phones frequently at their workstations while listening to calls that sales agents were on (even the card information section), which is in direct violation of PCI compliance. They might argue it was for contact purposes, but they were frequently on TikTok and other social media platforms. Sales agents weren't allowed to have theirs in the building.
My personal favorite was the implementation of 'rejects' on calls that ended in a sale. Calls were reviewed by Quality Control and if an agent missed or messed up a 'key' point on the call, the commission from that sale was kept by my employer instead of given to the sales agent. This, in theory, is to disincentive lying or misleading callers to earn commission. However, training was only a few days long and they didn't cover all of the reject points so it was very common for new hires to lose out on large amounts of commission in their first couple of weeks.
Management frequently encouraged agents to lie to the callers, as long as it wasn't about product speeds and features. We were encouraged to claim we've had HughesNet or we knew someone who had it and loved it. For example, “I had HughesNet for 3 years and it never lagged. I watched as many movies as I wanted too.” That type of behavior was permitted and encouraged by management to drive sales.
Although a good salesman (or woman) is typically very good at assessing a client's needs, we were REQUIRED to recommend the same plan to every single caller (30GB/month) before bringing up the others. Even if the caller asked for our lowest plan from the start.
To top it all off, they have a sign hung up in the office saying “You're in Sales not Customer Service”.
To say I'm antiwork after working there would be an understatement. Truly a terrible experience.
TL:DR; Worked for a shady sales center that actively encouraged the misleading of customers to generate sales and frequently broke PCI compliance and other rules.
