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The original was posted on /r/maliciouscompliance by /u/diegopallarez on 2023-07-06 07:37:38+00:00.

I used to work for a national ISP as tech support. I was really good at my job, too, because I was pretty technical even before working there. I had a decent customer service voice, and I knew how to help people fix the problem, and how to educate them to fix it on their own without calling back in the future.

I was good at everything except sales. I hated sales, and couldn’t bring myself to try convincing people to get a phone line when they didn’t want or need it.

But sales wasn’t, at the time, a huge part of our metrics, and since all of my other metrics were very good they mostly left me alone about it. I would get couching, I even got put on a call with someone to try and teach me sales, but nothing worked. (Mainly because I didn’t want it to.)

Then they tried coming at me from a different angle.

Turned out I had the shortest average call time in the entire call center. I was too efficient. Even though my customer satisfaction was high, and my rate of call back was low, my calls were “too short.” By talking to the customer and getting to know them better I had a better chance of selling them something.

At first I ignored them since nothing was in writing, and I wasn’t in trouble, but they kept bringing it up. I eventually decided to take them up on it.

The next few months I talked to people… A lot. We discussed the weather, their favorite movies, their job, or anything else that came up in conversation. I once had an hour long conversation with someone while we checked, and triple checked, each and every single piece of equipment in his house. Fascinating guy, worked for ma bell back when it was first broken up. He just wanted someone to talk to and, hey, they said make my calls longer, right?

My sales for that year went to 1, though I tried really hard for zero. Still, I was no longer the fastest person in the call center, but I might have been one of the friendliest…