Where do I begin? Well, about two weeks ago my wife and I were looking for work and we both saw an ad for "customer service specialists" at a company in the north end of town. We called for information and were able to set up interview appointments. The interview process was short and simple, we were then told to expect a call about training that would begin the day after our interviews (a Wednesday).
We showed up for the orientation with two young men and were bombarded with promises of making $2000 a month if we went to 60 demo appointments every month. Supposedly, these demos were already arranged and all we had to do was show up at the office, get in a company van, and then drive to an area where demos would be conducted.
Repeatedly we were told that we did not have to find these appointments ourselves and that there were canvassers who went through areas before we got there. Additionally, we were promised to make around $250 commission per machine sold and if it totaled more than the $2000 promised we'd get that much instead (the total from commission). Lies, lies, lies, lies, and more lies.
After training began, we were told that we needed to set up some practice appointments with friends and family for that weekend. These appointments would count towards our monthly requirement of 60 demos and if they resulted in a sale we'd get commission from it. All sounds fine so far. It turned out that setting appointments, let alone getting a sale, proved more difficult than we were led to believe.
That Sunday evening we got a call from the office and were told to arrive early Monday morning so we could get in the company vans and drive to Bellevue (about 90 miles south) for a meeting/demos. At almost ten that same Sunday evening, we received another call telling us to meet up with our co-workers at ten to 8am. TWO hours earlier than we'd been told to meet initially. This was the first sign of real trouble.
We reluctantly got up at 6:15am for a job we'd been told wouldn't start until 10:30 and headed to the appointed meeting area. As asked, we got there at 7:45am to meet. The other new guy showed up moments later. We waited until 8:20am when the company vehicle finally showed up. The two guys in the van were smoking as they climbed out of the vehicle (a company van. Smoking?) and reeked horribly of smoke.
The van itself was a mess. Papers were everywhere, food crumbs and old wrappers were scattered around, and the van had clearly been smoked in for months, if not years. My wife is allergic to cigarette smoke, and even being in the van when they weren't smoking made her have difficulty breathing, so you can imagine her reaction when they got out of the van with their cigarettes going. We called the supervisor and told him they were smoking in the van and he told us "They're not supposed to be. They'll put it out and you can go".
I explained that, no, we couldn't because my wife is allergic to the residual smoke too. I asked if we could drive our own car down and receive reimbursement for the gas used. He told us that the guys in Bellevue MIGHT give us a refund for the gas. We were disgusted and decided to start looking for other work. We gave it another go the next day, but had not been informed of the correct meeting location, which we'd been told was the office where we trained, but was evidently at some other office that morning.
When the guys who had been there for a while finally showed up in the smoke filled van we were told to hop in because we were going to Bellevue yet again. I called the supervisor once again and told him we couldn't ride in his company van because of cigarette smoke and he told us to just "chill" and he'd try to hook us up with another team in the area, the next day. We went out the next day with the other team, which was a much more professional group.
Despite the other teams' professionalism, we discovered that we would indeed be knocking doors to find appointments, in Oak Harbor (over an hour away). We left for the office at 9:30am and didn't get home until midnight that evening. Lame. Also, over the course of the day my wife and I managed to get 3 demos between us. Given that we need to get 3 demos each per day to get the promised $2000 a month, it seems terribly unlikely.
What really bothered me was that we had to knock the doors to find appointments, which we'd been assured was something we wouldn't be doing during training. Also, the tactics used during the door knocking were completely dishonest. We carried "gifts" like Spic 'n' Span or some kind of carpet stain remover to give people and were told to not mention that we work for Kirby.instead, we were to tell the potential customer that we were offering carpet cleaning for a new company in the area and that we'd only take about 15 minutes of their time. The demos really take more in the range of an hour and a half if they're short.
In short, the Kirby dealer lied to us about knocking on doors and the number of demos we'd be able to do. They also asked us to lie to potential customers just to get in the door. The guys who'd been working at the branch we applied at were slobs and the distributor couldn't provide us with a company car that wouldn't cause my wife's lungs to seize up. Do not trust kirby dealers!
0 comments