Isn’t it insane when companies don’t stick to JDs and expect too much from one employee?

This lady shares how her management made her do extra work without any commission.

Check out the full story. 

“Yes, your job is tech support. But you need to make more sales.”

Background: Website hosting tech support. Company was purchased by a large scale corporate empire notorious for making once-great hosting platforms suck.

When I first started my job, I loved it. I recruited a ton of my friends. I genuinely enjoyed the work. I liked my customers, and my customers liked our company.

They had a lot of fun at work!

We used to get praised all the time for being super friendly, not being in a rush to get them off the phones, and not harassing them to make a sale when they needed our help.

I had been told on multiple occasions things like “I’m just so thankful that there’s no pressure from me to buy anything. It’s really nice, so thank you!”

I get pulled into the Assistant Manager’s office with about 5 other people and my supervisor. He sits us all down and says he wants us to beta test something new. Sales.

There’s some immediate concern that a lot of employees in this department like Tech Support because we’re awkward and we aren’t natural salesmen, and we like to just fix things.

This is where it gets tricky!

He sugar-coats it, saying we’d only focus on sales relevant to what the customer called in about.

For example, if they need help buying a domain name, we could up-sell domain privacy, or a second TLD (.org, .info, .biz…) – the key here was that it needed to be relevant to their issue, so we aren’t putting a lot of pressure on them.

The goal was to be helpful and he stressed that our job is still tech support, and he profusely denied that they were trying to make us another sales team. Because “tech support is the most expensive department” (DUH! It’s supposed to be.)

So we try it out.

We log our sales in a spreadsheet for a while, noting which customer we talked to, what product we sold, etc. and they share our results with management and corporate.

And then they roll this out to the entire department. They change our back-end customer interface to have a big sales menu in the top corner where we can click a button to say which service we have recommended to them.

Things were pretty straightforward for sometime!

If the customer buys the product we recommended within a certain window of time, we would get credit for that sale.

Many of our techs hated it and called it early that this would ruin the laid back environment in the department, and it would annoy our customers.

Management didn’t care, and insisted that our jobs would never be dependent on us making enough sales.

Fast forward a bit.

I switched from the live chat team to the email team.

One thing we observed was that we would recommend a product/service, and the email would go 10+ hours without a response, then the customer would sign into their account and buy the service, and we wouldn’t get credit for that sale because our window to make the commission was 8 hours, and responses from customers over email just aren’t immediate, like the phone and live chat customers are.

Things started getting bad…

Plus, with email customers, they usually have a very specific reason to contact support, like an error in their email, or a programming issue with WordPress, and it made it feel a lot less natural to up-sell products with those kinds of support tickets.

I didn’t bother making sales anymore, even though management was pushing them very hard at this point. They set a minimum sales amount to $500 before we would receive a commission check.

So if you only sold $499 worth of products and services, you still wouldn’t get a commission check.

My supervisor posts a message in our chat room, asking for some honest feedback about why we have the lowest sales in the department.

He wants to know what our concerns are, and if he can think of ways to make it better, he’d pass that feedback up to Assistant Manager to see if they could make it happen.

UH OH…

So I mention how it’s more difficult to make sales when their question is very specific, and we don’t have opportunities to make small talk with customers while we wait for responses from other departments or senior technicians to fix their issue, and I mention how the 8 hour commission window may be too short for emails, suggesting that it may be easier if our commission window was 12-24 hours to accommodate for how long it takes for customers to purchase something when we have up-sold via email, in comparison to the often instant yes-or-no response over phone/chat.

Then I get an instant message from Assistant Manager. He’s pretty aggressive about my feedback regarding why I don’t try to make more sales.

He says I need to try harder, he brags about some other guy in the department on the phone team who happens to be a total natural salesman and he’s making these giant commission checks, and he says I need to stop complaining about the circumstances that make it harder for me to make a commission. (Okay… let’s get this straight. I wasn’t complaining.

Do I like making sales? No, that’s why I picked tech support instead of sales. But it’s not like I complained to my supervisor – he’s the one who asked us why we don’t even seem to try.)

That’s INSANE!

I clarify that sales from our team would probably be better if our sales window is bigger, because I had seen instances where I sold a service to a customer but they had waited to buy it until the next day, so I didn’t get a commission.

Assistant Manager: “Well, if you want, I can just change your commission window from 8 hours to 0 hours. How would you like that?” Yep, he just threatened to remove my ability to even make a commission at all… because I shared my opinion with my supervisor at his request.

I stared at his message for a moment, considering telling him to go sit on a cactus and quitting my job right then and there, but I was pregnant and we had baby stuff to buy.

She’s so done with all of this!

“Go right ahead, its not like I make a commission anyway.”

I quit shortly after this exchange, because I was nearing the end of my pregnancy and struggling to not tell customers to go take a long walk off a short pier.

It was a huge relief to not worry about having to come back to that work environment after having my baby.

YIKES! That sounds annoying!

Why would they treat her like that in the first place?

Let’s find out what folks on Reddit think about this one!

This user knows this girl had to quit this job!

This user knows how to respond to management like that!

This user knows which companies to avoid.

This user thinks this management is insane.

This user shares a similar experience!

Somebody’s being really unreasonable here!

Thought that was satisfying? Check out what this employee did when their manager refused to pay for their time while they were traveling for business.