A Samsung.com ‘expert’ has been fired after speaking up about working for free

Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge

On April 14th, The Verge published a story about how the experts who answer customer chats at Samsung.com were being pushed by both the company and Ibbu to do some customer support for free. Only one of the experts we spoke to was willing to be named in the story.

On the day after our story was published, she received an email saying that she was being temporarily suspended and that she would get an update in a week. Ibbu told her she had been fired.

The email was read by Larson.

After reviewing your activity on the platform, Ibbu has determined that grounds exist to terminate you from the platform. While we value and encourage any feedback from the Ibbu community and constructive communications on the livefeed, using the Ibbu platform for personal communications violates Ibbu policy, and in this case has also led to complaints from other community members. Furthermore, disclosing confidential information about the Ibbu platform on social media, and encouraging visitors, directly into the chat, to look at third party links or content is a material breach of policy and the Agreement, which constitute grounds for termination.

Ibbu didn't immediately respond to The Verge's request to share the policies it quotes or details why it terminated Larson.

• The initial email from Ibbu letting Larson know she was temporarily suspended.
• The termination letter Ibbu sent Larson.

They are not the only ones wondering if she lost her job for speaking out. Two other experts told us that they were terminated from the company after speaking to The Verge. Another expert who we didn't speak to but publicly posted our story on their page was also terminated. They are able to work on other Ibbu jobs if they so choose.

The experts were supposed to sell phones. In theory, that job involved logging into Ibbu's system when they felt like it and answering questions from people who had clicked the "chat with an expert" button on the website. The system didn't work as it was intended based on testimonies and evidence provided by people who have been fired. Experts often found themselves dealing with support questions from people having issues with their phones or orders instead of inquiries from customers trying to decide whether to go with the S22 Plus or Ultra.

The experts are not paid for answering support chats, they are paid on commission. The experts we talked to felt pressured by both Ibbu and SAMSUNG despite the fact that their contract says they shouldn't answer support questions. An employee of the company suggested answering support chats was a way to increase customer satisfaction.

The number and percentage of chats that turn into sales determine whether or not experts get to keep their jobs. It's hard to keep those numbers up when you tell customers they ended up in the wrong chat and that they have to go to a different part of the website.

The company didn't immediately respond to the question of whether the company had anything to do with the dismissal of Ibbu experts.

Ibbu terminated the experts we spoke to because of poor performance. Over a week after it let them go, the company acknowledged in an internal post that out-of-scope chats were a growing problem, though its estimate of only 2.81 percent of chats being misrouted by bots is significantly lower than what experts suggested. The company said that it was continuously working to lower this percentage as quickly as possible.

It's cold comfort for those who already got terminated emails because of low customer satisfaction and sales numbers. One of the former experts said that they have no desire to get that job back with the company. Both mentioned that they had difficulties meeting their goals.

She didn't expect Ibbu to keep her in limbo for so long, but she was surprised that she ended up being fired. She said she was glad she spoke up about the way the company treated her.