Work Harder, Not Smarter
Long ago, I sold European rail passes and tickets over the phone. It started out as a great job, booking itineraries, talking about traveling in Europe, of which I’d done a lot. Then a new manager took over and we were given a list of questions we had to ask every caller. When someone called and said, “I need to go from Paris to Brussels for work, and that’s it,” I was still required to go down this list of 20 up-sale questions about rail passes, travel insurance, other side trips, etc.
People would get rightfully furiously annoyed because their 2-minute call time would end up being 10 minutes of them saying, “No, I told you I don’t need any of that”. And us saying, “I know but I need to ask you anyway”. This of course increased hold times when calling to 40+ minutes in the peak season because every call took 5-10 times longer than they should.
I quit within the month and within 6 months, the owners, who were Swiss, found out what was happening and the branch manager was canned.