West Telemarketing
West Corporation West: The Unorganized Factory

I'm going to keep this to the point and real as possible. West will overhire to compensate for their high turnover rate. At times employees would have to park in other business parking spaces and risk being towed due to the unavailibilty of parking spaces. If you arrive 10 minutes before your shift and take 5 minutes past your shift to find a spot you are late and will recieve an infraction. West LOVES to advertise the fact that they have extra hours available. The trick is if you do pick up extra hours do not do so during the hours of 11PM - 5AM. The calls are slow and simply put you will be sent home. Although you might see in the system 3:00AM-4:00AM $12 dollars. You will more than likely be relieved at 3:30 thus will only make 6 dollars. Far cry from 12.

If you tell yourself: "Hey if I work inbound, I won't have to sell." Wrong! When you receive a call you are required to upsell, sometimes up to 5 items. Do outbound, you get paid more. My trainer was a hispanic male who was cool. However I found some discrepencies during training. The first: He said that if a caller wants to know the company you work for say "I work for a telemarketing company in San Antonio." Do not say "I work for West." It was forbidden. He said "You don't want an angry caller coming up here after you do you?" I later learned that West does not uphold proper business ethics. So if a caller wanted to sue they don't have the company name. If they decided to search in San Antonio, well San Antonio has hundreds of telemarketing companies so good luck.

The next thing that shocked me was we were not allowed to ask a caller if they were a child. The trainer said this could offend the caller because some women may sound really young. Then he proceeded to explain that if someone who obviously sounds like a child calls to order Kidz Bop or Digi Draw (etc,) and they can provide a credit card number; PROCESS it. This became the case with me when a little boys calls to order the Hover Disc (a huge hovering frisbee). He tells me that his dad is sleeping and he came back with the card he got from his dad's wallet. I angrily processed this transaction anyway because I know I would not want this happening to me.

During training at the Universal City office people were falling out of our training class like dead flies. Everyday the trainer was chunking someone's name tag. If we did not ask the 5 step probing questions for Cingular Wireless customers we were FIRED without question. If you were ever called into the office and the door was closed behind you, just automatically hand over your name badge. We also received threatning flyers that were silently placed on our cubicles that said "Follow the 5 step probing questions. Look around you, we are firing people everyday!" Some supervisors were high school age and had friends who instead of being on the phones would come to their cubicles and just chat it up while the rest of us took calls. If calls became high at the end of our shifts we had the option to stay for a step pin downgrade (taking away an infraction). Those who were lured into the bribe would have one infraction removed but if they made a mistake while on a call they would get back the same infraction that was taken away. Just go home!

Payroll discrepencies were common. Everyone had to fill out one some time or the other. We all fall into financial ruts where we just have to take anything. If so then West is a good choice. If you are not that desperate go work for Wal-Mart or McDonalds.

Company: West Telemarketing
Country: USA
State: Texas
City: Universal City (San Antonio)
Address: 2103 Universal Blvd (Pat Booker)
Phone: 2106599000

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