Disconnected: Samsung.com sales reps say the system makes them work for free

When the biggest phone launch of the year was announced, the woman was ready to make some money. She sells phones to waiting customers via online chats from the Ibbu app. Typically, the yearly showcase is a huge sales event for the company and a potentially big windfall for her.

Customers couldn't complete orders, and some were getting blank screens on the website, on the product release day. Customers were frustrated if they couldn't connect to the chats. The man gave up after two hours.

Why would she stay? She thought Unpacked would give her a break from the reality of her job, which has been to field a growing number of completely unpaid customer service calls. She wasn't going to get paid for the hours of customer complaints she had.

There is no hourly rate for the experts. They don't get paid if they don't sell anything. Originally, the money was good, but a once promising work-from- home job has deteriorated into a confusing mess of misdirected customers and inconsistent directions from superiors.

Customers looking for support may not be aware that they have been routed to someone who only wants to sell them a new product. The goal of the experts is to close sales, but they are portrayed as subject matter experts to help customers. They aren't trained in customer support.

A dozen chat agents from the website say they're expected to do it. They claim that the company is trying to have it both ways, with free customer service and an increasingly desperate sales team.

The staffing agency Ibbu has a new employee. She used to make between $800 and $1,200 a week doing sales chats for products from companies like Life Group. She was able to provide more financial support for her daughter at college because she was able to pay for her other kids extracurricular activities. She quit her teaching assistant job to work full time for Ibbu because of the money.

She began to see more and more service requests as she began to deal with customers who aren't looking to buy anything. The experts customer service chats are mixed in with the expected sales chats. Ibbu tells The Verge that it doesn't encourage its staff to take customer service chats, but it does encourage them to convert them into sales. Experts can be fired if they don't keep up their customer satisfaction scores.

Experts are expected to have an average customer satisfaction rating of at least 4.3 out of 5. They receive one point for every chat, three points anytime a customer gives them a rating over 4, and six points for every achievement a customer rewards them with. They can give an expert a bad rating if they try to help a customer who is unhappy.

They receive a warning if an expert's rating drops below 4.3. They used to get a 100 chat grace period to turn things around and get their rating back up, but now it's only 20 chats. They can be terminated if their CSAT doesn't improve after three warnings.

Even when colleagues want to help customers, they can.

Most communication from Ibbu representatives came from Otterbox. It was different when she started working with them. She felt like she was part of the company when executives from the company joined her on training calls.

Even when seeking answers to problems like website glitch or customer questions, it's like pulling teeth to get replies. There is a bug that causes an item's price to change when a customer puts it in their shopping cart.

We don't have access to anything so we are supposed to deal with those problems. Why shouldn't I spend the customer's time?

The official training documents that experts receive have both Ibbu and SAMSUNG logos at the top of each page, but a section specifically reads "do not answer customer service questions" and provides directions.

The ibbu chat is for online shoppers who want to buy something. If someone chats with you about anything else, you should not respond.

The instruction document states that the expert should close the chat and direct the customer to the support link. The document tells the experts to refer to themselves as a community member.

During a March 31st video call with experts, a recording of which was shared with The Verge, an employee of the company said that the experts use a hybrid chat platform for both customer service and sales.

She doubled down when she heard that customer service chats didn't really help with their conversion rate.

Scott Walker said on the March 31st call that the sales experts should think of their customer service work as a team effort. The customer will come back if experts make them feel good about the information. You may not get that sale, but someone else will.

Experts are supposed to get credit for a sale if a customer buys within two weeks of a chat, but at least five are not always seeing that.

After repeated requests, we were directed to Ibbu. In an email to The Verge, Ibbu says that the sales experts handle a small percentage of customers.

The agency explains.

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 experts said that the 2.5 percent figure was lower than what they were seeing. According to her research, it is closer to 25 percent. Several experts told The Verge that they can go an entire shift without receiving any customer service chats.

Independent experts have full control of their schedule, work whenever they want, wherever they are, are not exclusive to any mission, and may stop using ibb. It's a good situation for the company.

The experts say they have received instructions from both the staffing agency and the company. A person who asked The Verge not to use his name for fear of being retaliated against said that he was "mystery-shopped" by a person who was like the vice president of customer service for the company. She scolded him for not using a particular tool after the shopping process.

The experts we spoke to agreed with the sentiment that the work used to be lucrative but isn't anymore. When COVID restrictions first began, one said he used to make between $800 and $1,300 a week. He made only three sales on the Monday after the big February event, after chatting with almost four dozen customers.

Another expert says he doesn't depend on his income to help customers. He agreed that things have gotten bad over the past few months and that sales experts won't be able to make a lot of money handling customer service chats. A customer who wants to cancel an order or find out when a washing machine will arrive isn't really looking to buy anything, and he doesn't have access to the information that might help those customers anyway.

A third expert told us that an Ibbu representative assured them that experts wouldn't be punished for the site problems when assessing their ratings.

He was warned that his CSAT had dropped to 4.1. He was not the only one to report a negative impact from the launch of the S22

I bbu Ibbu is an on-demand community of experts that iscurated specifically for your brand by i Advize, the parent company for Ibbu and its experts. They are portrayed as brand ambassadors who can earn money on the side for their knowledge, and their website shows how they are compensated. Workers can be paid for every chat instead of just on commission, if companies choose to do so. Experts are paid according to their objectives, either per conversation or after a transaction. The experts are incentivized to offer the best quality of service.

The experts who sell the products are paid commission only. The 1.5 percent commission experts get from SAMSUNG sales is lower than the 8 percent she made from other Ibbu clients. To earn a decent paycheck, experts have to sell a lot of high-priced devices.

The arrangement seems to have been profitable for the company. It contracted with i Advize. An interview with Ed Billmaier, director of e-commerce customer service at Samsung Electronics America, claims that since partnering with i Advize, the company has grown its e-commerce sales by 10x.

Questions about the use of Ibbu experts and the use of contractor sales experts untrained in customer service were not answered by the company. Ibbu was directed questions by the company.

If the system isn't sending them enough money-making chats and the internal communication isn't clear, why continue as an expert? She takes a lot of breaks and is considering leaving. An expert tells us that people stay because they remember the good times. He remembers earning $1,000 at a product launch.

One expert said that you could do well on a big sale or a product launch. It seems like it isn't set up for people to last.