Samsung sales reps are allegedly working without pay
Product pages on Samsung’s US website have a “Chat with an Expert” button that allows potential buyers to ask questions about the product before purchasing. These queries are answered by sales reps contracted through staffing agency Ibbu,notthrough Samsung itself, and are meant to guide you through the purchase and make a commission for every deal they close. However, an explosive new report suggests that, with a 100% commission-based payment structure, these reps are now sending hours of unpaid time answering questions they don’t have the expertise or training to handle properly.
According toThe Verge, Samsung sales reps now have to attend to customer support requests, even though the company did not hire them for this purpose. The report goes in-depth into concerns surrounding the company, detailing how customer service requests, warranty inquiries, and more were initially not routed to these reps. Increasingly, however, workers have to spend time handling customer service outside of phone sales.
This situation is a problem for two reasons. First, the pay structure remains commission-based, so these independent contractors still only make money when they complete a sale, leading to hours of unpaid work. Second, customers are getting matched with reps whose goal is to push for sales regardless of their complaints, with Samsung and Ibbu allegedly encouraging contractors to convert any customer service chat into a sales opportunity. Likewise, these reps aren’t trained in customer support, so they may not be able to provide users with the best solutions or answers even if they genuinely want to offer assistance.
You would think that the launch of theSamsung Galaxy S22andGalaxy Tab S8 serieswould give the sales reps more opportunities to make money. However, if you tried to buy any of the devices on launch day, you might have experienced glitches (jumping prices when adding items to your cart, inability to complete orders, etc.). These issues turned potential sales into more service support queries for representatives, all without cash returns.
Samsung refused to comment to The Verge for this report, redirecting the site to Ibbu who issued the following comment:
Visitor requests are pre-qualified through a chatbot that filters out and forwards purchases requests to experts while excluding Customer Service requests. However, a very limited number of visitors may still occasionally bypass our automated chatbot filters and make customer service-related inquiries. Yet these requests amount to hardly 2.5% of all conversations answered by ibbü experts.
The report paints a grim situation of how Samsung and Ibbu abuse workers' time, and it’s worth reading in full for a complete picture of exactly what’s going down behind the scenes.
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