Secret confessions of a hotel/timeshare telemarketer
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Corporations behave in miserable ways these days. A nasty combination of Quarter-by-quarter thinking, executive-worker pay gap, and the distance between owner and consumer are largely to blame. (When the local butcher screwed you, you could ruin his reputation. When a multi-national corporation screws you, who cares?)
But as I often say to people who will listen, corporations need people to carry out their dastardly plans. One of the worst elements of our time is the alienation of consumer vs. consumer. People who work for corporations carry out orders to cheat their fellow human beings. Many feel like they have no choice – they need the job. Others, sadly, simply don’t think about it. Whenever I have one of those Kafka-esque experiences with a company that tries to trick me into paying a hidden fee or sell me something in a sneaky way, I always say something like this to the clerk: You do realize that you and I have much more in common than you and Mr. Verizon/ Mr. General Motors/ Mr. Bank of America. Why are you doing this? I’m just trying to inject some humanity into the situation. It rarely works, but I hope I am least make people think occasionally.
“Jon” is a reader who asked himself these very questions, and then, faced with repeated demands to do things he thought were unjust, he made an exit plan. Jon isn’t his name – we’ve omitted some details from this story to protect him. But his story is very familiar, expect for the ending. He did the right thing. You’ll see his “Confession” below. As you read it, please consider sending me your own anonymous confession. I’d like to start a new feature, encouraging workers to stop doing things because they are told, and to being pushing back on employers who are trying to deceive people. Email me at Bob@BobSullivan.net, and I’ll help you tell your story. And together, we will help make the American consumer landscape a little more fair.
And now, telemarketer Jon’s words, with very minimal changes:
I started working for the hotel company back in 2009. It started out normal, just making reservations and doing normal offers. We’d always ask if (consumers) wanted to join the free rewards program, if they weren’t already a member. We’d also ask if they needed another reservation and if we felt they needed it, ... transferred (them) to make a car rental. These all made sense to me and I had no issues making them. We also had a credit card offer which also did not bother me because it was very selective. In order to get this offer you had to be a member of the rewards program and you had to stay for “x” nights with the hotels during a calendar year. I’d maybe get 3 guests a week who qualified for that one, (in part) because of the laws passed that we had to be upfront and let them know it was for a credit card and for a specific company.
Then we got a new promotion we were supposed to make. This one, for the timeshare, really bothered me. We got trained on why this was good for the customer and why it was even better for the company. They tried to make it sound like everyone wanted a timeshare. They even let us know we could get in on this with a special employee price.
The tactics they taught us bothered me the most. There were certain criteria the guest had to meet, but we were not supposed to make that (determination). Even if the guest said something on the call that would make (them) not eligible we were still supposed to offer the transfer to learn about the timeshare.
At first we were only to make the offer on new reservations. The way we were trained to handle this was not to mention anything that would set the customer off knowing it was for a timeshare. In no way were we supposed to mention “timeshare” or “mini vacation.” We did not have a script and most of the offers would sound similar to this, “how would you like to learn how you could earn a free two night stay with our new hotel brand _____________?” To me it was misleading. It bothered me that we weren’t up front with the customer about what it was for. With this approach we could normally get 1 in 4 to accept the transfer.
When they started to see how many people we could get to transfer, they made it so we offered it to more people. We started offering on pretty much any call that came in. I started to notice that this would upset the guests and when I brought this up with management they said it was still procedure and we had to do it. We were offering it on information calls, reservations, modifications to reservations, and cancellations. Pretty much the only calls we did not offer this on was a call where the guest had to be transferred to a different department or where we gave them a phone number that they had asked for.
At this point for me it was too much. I spoke with my manager and got the same answers: “This is what corporate wants.” I was written up at one point because I was not giving the offers enough. So I started to look for another job. When I found a part-time job, I went part time with the hotel company and when my other job finally went full time, I walked in the next morning turned in my badge for the hotel job and walked out. A lot of my coworkers told me they wish they could do the same. I told them they could. It took me about 2 years to get out, but I quit as soon as I could. To me this is not customer service. It is misleading and will eventually hurt them.