Failure to Make Sales at Comcast is Employees Biggest Fear

Have you ever contacted your cable service provider to report a technical problem, a billing issue or downgrade your service only to have the customer service representative try to resolve your call by upselling you another product or package? Don’t worry, you’re not alone and you won’t be the last caller to experience this. What many customers don’t know is that providers like Comcast encourage their employees in customer service, tech support and other departments to make sales as part of their interaction with customers. This could be one of the main reasons why Comcast has such poor customer satisfaction ratings.

The Verge currently has a multi-part series called “Comcast Confessions”, where 150 current and former employees were interviewed and provided an inside look at what it’s like to work for a leading competitor in the cable industry. The findings reveal that sales play a big part in employee performance metrics.

According to The Verge sales pressure is enforced through monetary incentives, disincentives such as being put on a corrective action plan, and pressure from managers who instant message reps while they’re on the phone to ask why they haven’t pitched a sale yet.

“I don’t want any of our employees to feel that pressure to go through and sell…or feel like they’re going to get fired,” Tom Karinshak, Comcast’s senior vice president of customer experience, tells The Verge. “That’s not good for us.”

However, employees told us in no uncertain terms that they felt like the failure to make sales would get them fired. In some cases, employees told us they knew coworkers who had been let go for failure to make sales, or had been let go themselves.

The Verge obtained some of the internal training materials and metrics for customer service employees, which shows the company considers sales to be worth about 20 percent of performance.

Guidelines for repair reps, which show how a trouble call can be segued into a sales call, are part of S4, Comcast’s “universal call flow.” S4 is an evaluative measurement to ensure that all agents “give every customer a great call experience every time.” It stands for: start, solve, sell, summarize.

Part S3, or “sell,” includes four parts: “transition to relevant offer,” “present offer,” “overcome objections,” and “proactively close sale.”

For transitioning to a relevant offer, Comcast suggests lines like, “Did you call us from your home phone today? I noticed that you didn’t have phone service on your account,” and “Other than Boardwalk Empire, what kind of TV shows do you like to watch? Great, me too.” The “sales” portion of the call is worth 20 percent of the total score.

As with Comcast’s retention guidelines, which explain how to keep a customer who wants to cancel their service, Comcast lists situations in which a “transition to offer” is not such a good idea: “Customer is irate or doesn’t seem happy with the resolution,” “Customer in a delinquent status,” “Customer volunteers a ‘do not sell to me’ statement.”

Comcast points out that customer service will inherently include some sales: a customer who complains that their internet is too slow may want to upgrade to a faster tier, for example.

But after an especially frustrating customer service call went viral, Comcast admitted it has to change. Comcast is now in the process of reviewing “all training content for customer service and sales processes.” The company says it is also “reviewing and changing the messages we use in emails or calls to customers, in our automated phone system and in other communications to reinforce that the overall customer experience is our top priority.”

Now that we have had an inside look at why employees at cable providers like Comcast are always trying to upsell you on your problems, what are your thoughts on this type of sales strategy? How can they fix this process?

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