Exclusive Verizon representative reveals the good, the bad, and the scummy
Jim has had many years of experience in the customer service industry, working for American telecom companies.Verizonisn’t the only stint Jim has done, but it’s definitely their longest, and perhaps most interesting.
But what made Jim reach out in the first place? In their words, they wanted to set the record straight, because there are a lot of misconceptions about howVerizonconducts business. The company has its faults, but it’s not as bad as so many people make it out to be.
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Verizon’s use of AI
Like many others, Verizon has employed AI tools in its operations. | Image credit — Verizon
Naturally, as the use cases for them expand daily,Verizon has adopted AI tools in its day-to-day operations as well. However, much like with the customers, the company’s own representatives don’t really enjoy having to use these either.
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Jim explains the most-used AI tool atVerizon— Personal Shopper — and how it affects their ability to just do their job. Spoiler alert: it’s quite a lot.
“It’s called Personal Shopper. That’s already out there floating around, but it is real, if anyone had any doubt. Every time we open an account, it pops up.
It just builds a cart for their account. And it says they want this because X, Y, Z, and you should sell it to them. (…) You could press three buttons and sell it to them, and it pulls the most irrelevant items.
The only thing it gets right is knowing what kind of phone they’re gonna want. But that’s easy, we know every phone they bought was an iPhone, so of course it’s going to recommend an iPhone.
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That’s just basic intuition, stuff that I’ve been doing for years. I don’t need an AI to tell me how to do it.
It is the biggest nuisance that I have ever seen introduced into a point of sale system in nearly 10 years of sales experience. It is so obtrusive. Every time I open an account, I’m brought to Personal Shopper.
Every time I try to sell a thing, it pops up Personal Shopper. And sometimes, if you’re not careful, you miss removing a thing that Personal Shopper put in your cart, and then you accidentally slam an account. Yeah, it is the worst thing.”
— AnonymousVerizonemployee
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Sales quotas are not optional
Employees at stores have to meet certain quotas each month. | Image credit — Verizon
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Here’s the thing, sales goals aren’t an option. If a customer walks in, and the employee that tends to them doesn’t sell something irrelevant on top, they’re in trouble. There’s a reason the store employees are so pushy about making you buy something you don’t want: their livelihood depends on it.
“The other thing that less people know, and it’s the important one, is that we have numbers to hit as sales people, and it’s not just sales. It is every customer that walks in (…) if they come in to upgrade their phone (…) and let’s say they are on a basic plan, and they have no add-ons, my job if you come in to buy a phone is I have to get you to sign up for the insurance.
I have to get you to sign up for at least one perk. Perks are these little add-ons like subscription services, like Netflix, Disney+. (…) And I have to make sure your line is on a premium plan.
I can’t just let you be on the cheapest one. If I don’t get all of that, I am not doing my job according to the company.
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They expect, it depends on your location, but it could be anywhere from 60 to 75% attainment. So you need to get that many. Every phone that comes in, you need to get at least 60% of them to have insurance on them when they leave.”
— AnonymousVerizonemployee
But, unfortunately, it doesn’t end there. Even ifVerizon’s employees succeed in getting enough customers to sign up for extra perks, they’re not off the hook just yet. And this is where the deception, born of desperation, begins creeping in.“If they disconnect it any time in the next two months, that counts as a deactivation. You don’t get the credit. So I have to just assume I need to get this on everybody. Absolutely everybody. Because I have to account for the amount of people who will remove it.
So what we end up doing, and this is the really deceptive part, is if we update your plan, and we could find you a promo or whatever, or maybe you are on an older plan that costs and I could put you on one that’s cheaper, what we do is build in the insurance.
We just throw it in there and we’ll be like, yeah, yeah, the plan, it’s the same price. It includes insurance. It’s great. When really we’re adding a $15 protection plan and just kind of obfuscating it.
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And we do that with the perks. We do that with the insurance. We have to do that with even new lines of service.”
— AnonymousVerizonemployee
And, according to Jim, new lines are the number one thing you should be looking out for whenever you visit aVerizonstore.
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New lines are king. If I could save you $10 and a new line is only going to add $10, I’m going to tell you your bill stays the same and may or may not tell you about the new line.
— Anonymous Verizon employee
Representatives will always try to sneak in new lines, and they may not always manage to keep your bill the same. When asked ifVerizonemployees ever feel pressured to use dishonest tactics, Jim had to admit that they did.
“If you have one person who is paying attention to what you say, paying attention to the quote, they say no to everything. I now feel extra pressure to push something onto the next customer. (…) I could just say flat out, it is pressure. It really is.
It sucks, but it’s done in such a two-faced way (…) every training we’re given, every single training we get that has to do with learning new sales methods, or here’s the new product we’re going to be talking about with customers, here’s how you sell it, position it.
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Those trainings always include their favorite line, sell with integrity. I genuinely think the executives way at the top, who greenlight this kind of stuff, are oblivious to the fact that the only way we achieve their numbers is through sheer drive.
Just sheer like, we’ll get it somehow. We’ll add it to some poor sap’s account and we’ll just have to deal with it later if they catch on.
And it’s not every rep: a lot of us aren’t malicious about it. I try to be very transparent with customers. And I’ve just been doing this long enough that I can actually sell a product.
But there’s been times where I’m just like, all right, it’s the end of the month, I need a thing, I’ll deal with this later. Because you just need to hit your numbers.”
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— AnonymousVerizonemployee
Worst of all, as mentioned before, representatives’ careers are always on the line, and they’re one month away from possibly being let go fromVerizon.“If you miss your goals one month, all right, it might’ve been a bad month, whatever. If you miss your goals two months in a row, you’re put on what they’ll refer to as an “action plan”. You work one-on-one with your managers to achieve your goals the third month.
(…) They’ll do like coaching and work with me: “every time you talk to a customer, bring your quote to me first so we could review it and see if there’s a way we can add some to it”. If that falls through, you can be put on like a final notice or even terminated, depending on how bad things are.”
— AnonymousVerizonemployee
And, naturally, some people just can’t keep doing this.
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I’ve seen some former representatives say that they just couldn’t do it, they got burnt out. They couldn’t keep pushing people to add new extras onto their bill. It’s not for everybody, it really isn’t.
If you’re too honest of a person, cell phone sales just ain’t it. I’ve worked for a couple companies, and it’s the same story everywhere you go.
— Anonymous Verizon employee
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Every customer is a target
Keep your guard up around these parts. | Image credit — Verizon
Though this is something that’s true for most of the sales industry, it’s especially true for companies likeVerizon. No customer that walks into a store is safe from potentially being sold something that they don’t want, no matter how morally dubious it may be.
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In fact, the manager of your store will egg you on.
“Just to give you a vague example: working on an account for an elderly person. They come in, they’re the only phone on this account, it is one cell phone for one old person.
The first question you’ll always get asked when you go away from the sales floor to go work on a quote, or to grab a phone or whatever is, hey, is there any way we can get a new line on this? How do you justify a second phone line for like a 70-year-old woman who doesn’t even have a husband any ?
— AnonymousVerizonemployee
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Verizon’s priority upgrades are fact
Big Red doesn’t want you leaving. | Image credit — Verizon
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It’s not really a secret any , but a few months back, people began to notice thatVerizonhad upped its efforts to retain customers. If you requested a port out PIN, or showed any signs of leaving, you would suddenly get a new deal. These, according to Jim, are called priority upgrades.
“It was the first quarter of the year.Verizonhad to put in their quarterly report that they lost, it was like a net loss of somewhere in the six figures amount of customers, and it threw them into a bit of a panic. The stock price dropped a little bit, (…) it caused a big issue at the top.
Now we have a new system of priority upgrades. So you come into my store.
If a customer that has been withVerizona long time (…) they have an older phone, so they’re not tied to any sort of agreement, contract, whatever you want to call it, so they can leave if they want. The system might flag their account as a priority upgrade.
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So this is a customer that could leave, maybe has shown that they might try to leave. That could be caused by, like, if they’ve ever requested a transfer pin or if they have gone onto the website a few times to shop around but then don’t buy anything. You’ll get flagged as a priority upgrade, which is actually a good thing, (…) it just means thatVerizonis gonna offer you better deals to keep you.”
— AnonymousVerizonemployee
But it wouldn’t have been a new tool if AI wasn’t involved, and didn’t mess everything up in the process. According to Jim, the system that tracks these priority upgrades keeps messing up.
Employees often have to use a manager’s tablet to help a customer, just so they don’t get written up for not doing their job according to the system.Jim wants to tellVerizoncustomers with lots of lines on their account to please try using the company’s app for their needs first. Due to the messed up priority upgrades system and its flawed tracking, an employee who gets stuck with such a customer is almost never going to hit the quotas they’re given, and everyone in the store wants to avoid dealing with such a customer.
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But, as Jim points out again, the upper management atVerizonkeeps pushing for higher numbers each month, and pretty much turns a blind eye to how their employees get those numbers. It shouldn’t come as a surprise at all, then, that some workers resort to dishonest means to hit their quotas.
Verizon treats its employees right, most of the time
It’s not a bad gig, working at Verizon. | Image credit — Verizon
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With all of the quota stress, the difficult conversations with customers, the fast-paced action behind the counter, and the annoying AI tools, why doesn’t Jim leave or join up with someone else?
Truth is,Verizonis actually a pretty great place to work at, if you can keep meeting your quotas. Jim makes pretty decent money, especially because of the commissions, and prefers working atVerizonover other telecom companies that they’ve worked at in the past. According to Jim,Verizon’s corporate culture, and how it affects employees, often trumps that of its rivals.
“When it comes to corporate culture, and in the sense of like just taking care of your people, they do genuinely give us a lot. They give us a ton of benefits, the pay is good if you could deal with the little bit of the shady stuff dragging on your soul. They’ll take good care of you.
— AnonymousVerizonemployee
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When asked what it was like working at their previous job with another carrier, Jim said it was a bit of a madhouse.
(…) could be a bit of a madhouse (…) one thing I can remember is that just no one knew what was happening ever, and it was always just chaos. Maybe it’s changed since then, it’s been a while, but it was always a lot confusing, you never knew who to talk to. (They) would release a new service and no one knew anything about it, but you’re just expected to sell it.
— Anonymous Verizon employee
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Overall, Jim is pretty satisfied with their life atVerizon. In fact, they can’t see themselves working for a rival company, because it’ll be the same thing for smaller paychecks.
I’m happy with working where I’m at. I know what we do could be a little shady: I mean, it’s the same thing over at T-Mobile too, to be honest, it’s going to be no different. It’s just that you wear pink instead of a red shirt, and you hand out goodies on Tuesdays.
— Anonymous Verizon employee
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Before we ended the call, we asked Jim why precisely they had reached out, aside from trying to set the record straight. Jim says it’s because they want people to become knowledgeable of what goes on at these companies.
“(…) the biggest reason I’ve been telling myself that I want to do this, and that made me reach out after reading another one of those articles on your site, was so if there’s a way to make people aware to this kind of stuff, then the companies have to react in some way.
Like, customers get smart to it, say no to these offers, do their own stuff, shop online maybe and just get what they want. Yeah, at the store level, it could come around and bite me a bit. I might have a bad month or two, but if that means that the company itself reacts in a way where the goals aren’t as aggressive towards the customers, then everybody kind of wins in the end.
It just becomes a little bit of an honest system where I don’t have to just try to get everything on every account because numbers.”
— AnonymousVerizonemployee
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تاريخ النشر:2025-10-27 19:47:00
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