Inselligence
“Okay. The reason I’ve brought you guys in here today is because there’s been a few complaints about the pay,” said Hallsy. “I know a few of you are worried that you’re not being paid correctly. Consider this: our parent company TalkLink is a publicly listed company. If anyone complains to Ernst & Young that they’re not being paid correctly, then we’ll be audited and probably get into a whole heap of trouble. It’s in our interests to pay you as much money as we can, to keep you guys happy and to keep the company profitable. If we don’t, it’s just going to result in a high turnover and we’ll have to spend thousands of dollars on training new staff.”
We were all sitting around Hallsy like schoolkids, some on the floor, some on the chairs up the back. He stood in front of us in a charcoal suit, extremely animated. He hardly stopped to take a breath.
“The thing is, we can have a workplace where you dot all the I’s and cross all the T’s, and everybody is really bored because of these procedures and bullshit that you have to go through just to pick your nose. What I really want, and what I think you guys want, is to have a fun work environment where we don’t worry too much about that stuff.
“Now, as for the sales process. There’s a lot of back-end stuff that you guys don’t really think about when you’re on the phones, so I’m going to explain a few things to you. When you do a sale, and do the verbal recording, it goes through a few stages before it’s cleared and you will get paid for that sale. Firstly, we send it upstairs to compliance. Those guys go over the recording with a fine-tooth comb to make sure it’s all ridgy-didge. If it’s not – if you’ve told the customer a lie on the recording, or you’ve not answered their questions correctly, then we can’t submit it to the client. Simple as that. We can’t send them a verbal contract where you’ve made up some new terms for the customer. That’s why we have compliance.
“The guys up in compliance are basically all sales rejects who can’t do a real job, so they’re all bitter and twisted and they’re going to be really harsh on your recordings. So that’s my first point. Keep the recording clean. I don’t care if you have to dodgy it up to get the customer into the recording – just as long as the recording itself is clean, and make sure you do a thorough rehash so at least by the end of the call, the customer understands what’s going on.
“After compliance, the record gets submitted to the client, and they send out a welcome pack to the customer. Who here has got a welcome pack in the mail?”
Ten people put up their hands.
“Fantastic – there you go. Now those of you that are with us for your electricity at home will know that it doesn’t actually have any sales material in it. It doesn’t sell the customer at all. It just has some information about GreenPower and lists of rates, that sort of crap. That’s why soft-selling is such a bad idea. I know a lot of you might say stuff to the customer trying to just hustle a sale through, saying ‘We’ll just send you out the information so you can have a look through it.’ No. No. That’s never going to work. Of course they’ll get the information in the mail and say ‘What the hell is this?’ Thinking they only agreed to get information, and there in black and white it’s saying that they’ve signed up for the service. What do you think they’ll do next? Of course they’ll ring inbound with an abusive call telling them to cancel the sale.
“The thing is, I know what goes on. You guys get your pay, see that you haven’t been paid for all your sales, and you turn to the next guy in your pod and start complaining about it and negging out everybody around you. Isn’t that so Bernie?”
“Not really, I haven’t been complai-”
“No, I know how it is and I know how it goes. You’ll start whinging about it to everybody, blaming the company, when really the reason is that you haven’t done your job properly. You haven’t read the recording script correctly, and you’ve put through dodgy sales.”
I was sitting near the back of the room, with a look of emotionless consideration on my face. Hallsy was up there talking so fast, and I was listening carefully to every word, trying to decipher what he was trying to make us believe, and what the real message was.
“Can’t we get a report where we can see which sales were cancelled and the reason why?” said the Geordie.
“That’s a good idea, and I’ve looked at it, but with the current systems in place it would be too expensive to implement.
“Anyway, as I said, we can have a workplace that’s focused on getting everything correct and precise, and have a gazillion procedures to follow, and everyone has to sign in and sign out, and get all the KPIs that measure how long you took a toilet break for –”
I caught Hallsy’s eye for an instant, and I could see him flinch. Something beneath the surface came through for a second, and I didn’t like it.
“- or… we can have a fun workplace that’s focused on building culture and having a good time.”
Hallsy sent us out of the meeting room and we went to get on the phones.
“That was a motivational meeting,” said Abbott. “Want to know why you’re underpaid? Because you’re shit.”
Six months later I found out that our admin Tiffany had been fired for making consistent errors in the pay. One week she neglected to pay someone entirely, and tried to give him money to stop him from telling the managers.
“Please don’t tell Keats,” she said. “Here, I’ll give you $200.”
“Uh… but I was supposed to be paid $450 this week.” Fail.
At my new workplace, one of the first things we did in training was a module about sexual harassment, OH&S, and drugs in the workplace. At Inselligence, Ranga would come out during game time and ask if anyone had a $5 bill.
“Sure I’ve got one,” I said, guessing that he had two $2 coins and a $1 that he wanted to change up.
“Cool – don’t worry, I’ll bring it right back.” He took it, started rolling it up, went to the bathroom for five minutes, came back and handed it to me.
“Getting a little motivation there?” I inquired.
“That’s right – time to sell the shit out of some customers!”
I didn’t realise it when I started at Inselligence in Melbourne, but I’d actually worked for the same company when I was living in Newcastle, doing door-to-door. We were representing a government-owned company, so everyone had to sign a declaration saying they’d never been convicted, blah blah. Somehow, I was the only member of my team who hadn’t served hard time.
I turned around when we were driving out to turf in the van. Derrick was applying make-up to his face.
“What… what the fuck are you doing?!”
“Putting foundation on to hide my tattoos.”
“Oh. Right. Of course.”
