WAAAYYY too many sub-par/unintelligent employees dealing directly with customers. - Sales ADT Employee Review

I did phone sales in their main corporate call center on basic salary plus commission. Started at the bottom making less than unemployment pay, and worked my way up to 50-60K range. We work 8.5 hour shifts, and about 95% of the year, they turn your 15 minute breaks into 10 minute breaks, which barely gives you enough time to walk to the break room, grab a snack, and get back on the phone (these 10 minutes lost each day adds up to an extra 40 hours a year they'd get out of us, yet not compensate us for). You have to be on the phone for 90% of your shift (including your breaks and 30 minute lunch...which means you get 6 minutes per hour to make notes in accounts, use the restroom, catch your breath, etc.). Not out of reach, just makes for a very 'nose to the grindstone' day. Each time you change positions, you get bumped to the back of the scheduling bid. Which means if you have seniority/years with the company and work a 9am-5pm shift, but you want to try a different department, you have to work 4pm-12midnight shift for months. This doesn't work too well for most people that have actual lives. If/when you get sick, you typically get laryngitis because of the constant talking, and you only get five days a year to be out sick (laryngitis typically last 3-4 days). Once you go over those five days you'll get points, which eventually leads to termination. So get sick twice a year and you're pretty much done. That being said, no one has any sick time the last few months of the year and EVERY ONE comes to work sick, spreading germs and eventually getting others sick. There is no such thing as an unpaid sick day at ADT, so once you go over your five day: bye-bye. You also have to get a certain amount of sales each day to meet stats in order to keep your job. Not a big deal at all IF (huge IF here) the calls that came to you had anything to do with your department. Most calls that come in directly from customers are great, but we get about 85% of our calls from other departments/buildings that literally have NOTHING to do with the stat we're supposed to meet to keep our job. There's now a lot of regions that are "no phone sales" that used to be sellable when the stats were created. These calls can kill a sales reps attitude and work performance as they make next to nothing dealing with these customers and are not available to take calls where they actually could be making money for themselves and the company. The company uses extremely outdated programs to gather information/create sales which also hurts efficiency and overall makes the company lose money. There are WAY too many different programs that have to be accessed to view all aspects of each account. If they updated their software to something more efficient, and each sales rep made JUST ONE more sale a day, it could add up to millions in revenue each year for the company (more than enough to cover the cost of a software update over a couple year period). They also now wants sales reps to do billing reps job (cancel service), which again adds up to even more precious time where sales reps could actually be making money for the company. There are many people in this company who just work on basic salary (non-commissioned employees in monitoring centers/tech support/NDC/billing/CSG) and transfer frustrated customers somewhere else just to get them off their phone. We're here to make sales, not correct other departments mistakes. This, in turn effects the customers, making them more frustrated because it's the seventh time they were transferred and they end up canceling their service because we can't help them with their issue (it also ends up effecting sales peoples attitudes/work performance which has the potential to make the company lose even more money/customers). My advice is simple here: have monthly/quarterly up-training for employees to help them actually help the customers and get the right people on the phone to efficiently/effectively help customers. There are no Christmas bonuses, no holiday gatherings, no moral building efforts, no up training, not really anything to foster a good, healthy working environment. The company only really cares about flipping employees faster than IHOP can flip pancakes. This way they don't have to pay people full commissions (it takes months to build up a commission baseline), they save a little bit of money a year, and get a fresh new group of clones to come learn their antiquated system, frustrate customers, and eventually upset customers to the point of canceling service. In my estimation, the company is on a downward spiral if they continue running their business this way. Letting 'green' employees that know little to nothing about your horribly inefficient operating systems and deal with customers is not what I'd call the way to create world-class customer service. Business 101 people: it takes less $ to keep existing customers than it does to create new ones.