Exclusive: Verizon representative reveals the good, the bad, and the scummy

But Personal Shopper has nothing on the stress that Verizon’s employees face daily when it comes to meeting quotas, because there are some very strict requirements for that.

Sales quotas are not optional

Here’s the thing, sales goals aren’t an option. If a customer walks in, and the employee that tends to them doesn’t sell something irrelevant on top, they’re in trouble. There’s a reason the store employees are so pushy about making you buy something you don’t want: their livelihood depends on it.

But, unfortunately, it doesn’t end there. Even if Verizon’s employees succeed in getting enough customers to sign up for extra perks, they’re not off the hook just yet. And this is where the deception, born of desperation, begins creeping in.

"If they disconnect it any time in the next two months, that counts as a deactivation. You don't get the credit. So I have to just assume I need to get this on everybody. Absolutely everybody. Because I have to account for the amount of people who will remove it.

And, according to Jim, new lines are the number one thing you should be looking out for whenever you visit a Verizon store.



Representatives will always try to sneak in new lines, and they may not always manage to keep your bill the same. When asked if Verizon employees ever feel pressured to use dishonest tactics, Jim had to admit that they did.

"If you have one person who is paying attention to what you say, paying attention to the quote, they say no to everything. I now feel extra pressure to push something onto the next customer. [...] I could just say flat out, it is pressure. It really is.

Worst of all, as mentioned before, representatives’ careers are always on the line, and they’re one month away from possibly being let go from Verizon.

"If you miss your goals one month, all right, it might've been a bad month, whatever. If you miss your goals two months in a row, you're put on what they'll refer to as an “action plan”. You work more one-on-one with your managers to achieve your goals the third month.

And, naturally, some people just can’t keep doing this.

Every customer is a target

Though this is something that’s true for most of the sales industry, it’s especially true for companies like Verizon. No customer that walks into a store is safe from potentially being sold something that they don’t want, no matter how morally dubious it may be.

In fact, the manager of your store will egg you on.

"Just to give you a vague example: working on an account for an elderly person. They come in, they're the only phone on this account, it is one cell phone for one old person.

Verizon’s priority upgrades are fact

It’s not really a secret anymore, but a few months back, people began to notice that Verizon had upped its efforts to retain customers. If you requested a port out PIN, or showed any signs of leaving, you would suddenly get a new deal. These, according to Jim, are called priority upgrades.

"It was the first quarter of the year. Verizon had to put in their quarterly report that they lost, it was like a net loss of somewhere in the six figures amount of customers, and it threw them into a bit of a panic. The stock price dropped a little bit, [...] it caused a big issue at the top.

But it wouldn’t have been a new tool if AI wasn’t involved, and didn’t mess everything up in the process. According to Jim, the system that tracks these priority upgrades keeps messing up. Employees often have to use a manager’s tablet to help a customer, just so they don’t get written up for not doing their job according to the system.

Jim wants to tell Verizon customers with lots of lines on their account to please try using the company’s app for their needs first. Due to the messed up priority upgrades system and its flawed tracking, an employee who gets stuck with such a customer is almost never going to hit the quotas they’re given, and everyone in the store wants to avoid dealing with such a customer.

But, as Jim points out again, the upper management at Verizon keeps pushing for higher numbers each month, and pretty much turns a blind eye to how their employees get those numbers. It shouldn’t come as a surprise at all, then, that some workers resort to dishonest means to hit their quotas.

Verizon treats its employees right, most of the time

With all of the quota stress, the difficult conversations with customers, the fast-paced action behind the counter, and the annoying AI tools, why doesn’t Jim leave or join up with someone else?

Truth is, Verizon is actually a pretty great place to work at, if you can keep meeting your quotas. Jim makes pretty decent money, especially because of the commissions, and prefers working at Verizon over other telecom companies that they’ve worked at in the past. According to Jim, Verizon’s corporate culture, and how it affects employees, often trumps that of its rivals.

"When it comes to corporate culture, and in the sense of like just taking care of your people, they do genuinely give us a lot. They give us a ton of benefits, the pay is good if you could deal with the little bit of the shady stuff dragging on your soul. They'll take good care of you.

When asked what it was like working at their previous job with another carrier, Jim said it was a bit of a madhouse.



Overall, Jim is pretty satisfied with their life at Verizon. In fact, they can’t see themselves working for a rival company, because it’ll be the same thing for smaller paychecks.



Before we ended the call, we asked Jim why precisely they had reached out, aside from trying to set the record straight. Jim says it’s because they want people to become more knowledgeable of what goes on at these companies.

"[...] the biggest reason I've been telling myself that I want to do this, and that made me reach out after reading another one of those articles on your site, was more so if there's a way to make more people aware to this kind of stuff, then the companies have to react in some way.