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Hours: days, evening, weekends
Places: USA
Training: a few hours
Type of phone: auto dialler
Bonus: usually not obtained by majority
Rate of pay: low hourly wage
Legit or illegit: illegit yet staff not told this
Security: serious sucker lists, disproportionately high amount of black consumers
who have cancelled credit card
Pressure: ruthless, staff come and go like mosquitoes
Jerry, 23, ex-caterer
This place was so sleazy you should place a big red
warning on the doors, or someone should. They told us it was a credit card plan. I wish I had never set foot in the door.
I was a chef before and still am. This was a part-time job for me. My wife handles all our finances. Don't know nothing
about credit cards. Do know when something is wrong.
Our bosses never told us when we in training that the card offered
is a card that is called a catalog credit card, the buyer can only spend the credit line in once place, the shopping catalog
that comes with the credit card.
So you tell the people on the phone that they will have a credit line just in time
for Christmas and all they get is a card with a catalog. They have to buy those goods none other.
Excuse me for sounding
like a racist, but the people we called in the States sounded really really black and really really really broke. You could
tell this because not only had they torn up their credit cards, now they had torn up their bank check books as well.
All
the offices here go by Way Bills or credit cards. This office stood out because it went into the bank counts. This was really
the job from hell, because it was also auto-diallers, clients that sounded like they were one step up from living in a tent
on the street, and bosses who stood behind you telling you you were helping these poor blacks by giving them Christmas spending
money.
Even with all this, the campaign was going very badly. The bosses surprisingly seem to have some rules to follow
because at the start of the campaign they stressed we could not ask them about their savings counts as though that was a point
of principle.
Then they come along a week or two later when even top sales people are faltering, and say okay, we
have changed our mind, you can get that savings account number.
Like all places, they even push you to get the card
number or bank number of a friend of the person who has torn up his cards or has no bank accounts. Even if you talk to a guy
that has no cards and no bank accounts, they will blame the failed sale on you.
They did surveillance on us all the
time, telling us that was so we would all obey the laws.
I don't know where they got their leads from, they were the
saddest voices I heard in all my life. Someone should know about these leads in the shopping credit card offices. They must
have been passed on from other offices and are the last stop in the food chain of the Montreal telemarketing industry.
I
left when I found out it was not a real credit card being offered. I am working in a bakery now and also do some work for
the film business in the city.
Oh, yes, they had a second project, selling travel tours to Florida. I have seen this
before, it is offered by a famous American hotel corporation.
Andrew, 38, ex-insurance executive
I worked at one of those auto-dialler places that do insurance and telephone companies
mostly.
I have gone back to university and do not know how I will pay all my bills, except
that I am lucky to have a good wife who has a stable job with Bell.
This place paid rock-bottom, about $7 an hour.
They did a lot of commission altering. for example, most places like this have a weekly
rate for the commission based on how well the sales are going on that campaign.
If the sales were going well, the bosses changed the rate in the middle of the shift!
Sometimes in the middle of the hour! This made it hard to keep track of your rates.
I would never have bought insurance like this, in a two minute sale, you don't know
where the call is coming from and you can never speak with the person who sold you the policy.
When I was a boy on the Lakeshore, our insurance man came right to our house,
and sat down in the kitchen and talked to my mom and dad. He came from a famous name company that had a big building
in downtown Montreal and my parents knew him for years. The way things used to be done can be the
best way, sometimes.
Back to the high-pressure place. It was a lot of pressure for not much money.
You could be washing dishes at a submarine sandwich joint for less stress on the head. One night two of the top salespeople
broke out into a bad argument, they got up to their feet and almost were punching one another out.
The managers whisper in their ears to compete with one another, to get those sales
up. The managers too have to compete with one another. There was listening in on all the calls from several areas.
I thought that was against the law, we are only told when the clients who are using our company are tapping in. Not
when our own managers and bosses are cutting in.
The competition is so fierce that even the day and night shifts are turned against
one another. One night, a young girl who was always better than the day shift employees was lectured for being the slowest
on her team of four that night. She was working with two of the best on the floor, and her sales were still higher than
day shift.
You pick on the weakest to increase the fear of being fired, so the fear will get
the sales up. The girl started to cry. Instead of backing off, the tears seem to make the boss want
to dominate and control the situation. Any jerk who sells a lot thinks he has great people skills, whether or not he
does or not.
Since almost offices in the city paid the same or more, she had nothing to lose by
flipping out, which she did. Over a hundred people in the room, including the entire French end of the office, stopped
to listen to the argument.
I'll never forget what she said, when she left the room that night. She spoke for
a lot of us myself included.
I am not telling you. Sometimes pain requires privacy. Not listening in
on others' conversation. And everyone would know where this happened, too.
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