Wanna know why your call to customer service went so poorly? Maybe because it was routed to an outsourced call center run by Teleperformance USA where, according to an insider, customer service goes to die…

Anonymous writes:

Subject: Verizon Online, Apple, AT&T, Sprint, AOL, Boost Mobile, DELL, Microsoft, X-Box Live Support and many others

When customers have issues with the company/service listed in the subject, I can honestly state it is most like not because of the company themselves, but a company named Teleperformance USA.

Chances are that the reason a large portion of consumers receive poor customer service is because the reps they are speaking with are employed by Teleperformance USA. Human Resources basically severely lowered the bar in standards when it came to hiring.

Training for each project varied between two weeks to five weeks. Sprint being a four to five week training course, Verizon being two weeks and so on.

The clients such as Sprint and Verizon had policies set for us to follow, but management would over-ride them and set their own policies. For example, Teleperformance hired absolutely non-technical people for Verizon Online and would pretty much force the agents to refer to vendor for even the most minor issue.

Verizon provided a very large knowledge-base for the agents that would help resolve a lot of issues. Supervisors and Trainers alike would have the representatives get rid of the call because it “wasn’t their responsibility”.

When it came to training new-hires or even updating current employees on new standards, it was more like babysitting a room full of children. Trainers were pretty much told just to provide “numbers” for our clients to make it look like they were being trained. After many years of that being done, it was practically impossible for trainers to actually help train and uptrain. Management looked the other direction when it came to “cheating” on the final exams for training for new hires to be fully employeed or current employees to be considered ‘certified’.

Due to the fact that agents weren’t being properly trained, policies weren’t adhered to. Simply because, no one knew them. Their supervisors don’t care what they do. Especially in Sprint. In training, we told new hires that they are there to help customers with billing and phone issues and upselling is the least of their concern. On the floor, supervisors told the agents that trainers did not know anything about working on the floor (which was an outright lie, since we had to have high QA scores and Customer Satisfaction ratings from Sprint to be a trainer) and told them that sales was their highest importance.

So, agents didn’t care about billing issues, blamed the customer for it then tried to upsell them more junk. That way agents would make a commission and supervisors got a percentage of their teams overall commission amount.

The overall attitude within Teleperformance is that their clients demands do not matter for the most part and will lie, cheat and steal to make number look good to provide back to these clients. On more than one occasion, Sprint, Boost, and Verizon has came through call centers and pulled projects because Teleperformance was not doing their job.

Teleperformance holds about 70% of Sprint Call Centers. Sprint holds pretty much only the Consumerist Line, Executive line and a group called White Glove for VIP members.

Now, there are some agents that really do want to do a good job there, but they are few and far between. So the only thing I can say is that the consumer needs to exercise caution when contacting the listed companies.

In this case, the customers are getting ripped off just as the companies who hired Teleperformance USA. No wonder it’s necessary to keep telling aggrieved customers to escalate to executive customer service or send an EECB just to fix basic issues.

Want more consumer news? Visit our parent organization, Consumer Reports, for the latest on scams, recalls, and other consumer issues.