Cox Communications Outbound Sharks take a bit out of consumers Rcho Sta Marg California

I have been a contract employee for Cox Communications for the last 9 months. My contract was ended July 5th. I believe my contract was ended because I reportd to many customer complaints.

The goal as a outbound shark is to be promoted to the "Shark Tank". The Shark Tank is where you take inbound calls from customes that want to order services. The outbound shark tank has pictures of sharks and a board with a big bit taken out of it. I have pictures.

The outbound sharks are to call customers and persuade them to take our digital channels and a DVR or Digital Reciver for a period of 2 or 3 months. We sit on a dialer and call hundreds of our existing customers over and over again. I worked 23 hours a week and was making $5,000 a month to do this.

On the surface the goal is to get customers to sign up for the digital service. In that department I was repremanded for letting customer know when the promotion was about to expire. The supervisor told us on numerous ocassions that all the people wanted was something free and the only way we could make money was to hope they forget and get charged.

We would also do something called "Premiums" We would call and tell customers we are tuning on HBO & Showtime free for two months. The catch with all of this is that we do not turn off the service and customers are billed and get angry and just have to take it and pay.

The other catch is that when we send them a DVR we don't tell them they have to pay for pick up. Many unspecting senior citizens, in assisted living and on fixed incomes get duped by cox. In many cases we just drop ship the DVR and Digital Received and they don't know exactly what they are getting.

In other instances some customer are told we "Are Going Digital" and they believe they need it. The package we attached to their account is around $50.00 and we tell them "It starts at $11.95.

When customers call to cancell the service I have received numerous complaints with the same story. It took on average about 3 phone calls depending on if they got a shark or not when trying to cancell.

Reps that take cancellations are monitored for how many cancellations they take.

Will Cox you are billed upfront. So customers who have their accounts paid by automatic withdrawal and don't have the service have already paid for it and get very angry.

I just think that the customers out there should know about the Shark Tank. I don't think it is a very customer service friendly name for a department taking orders and I don't think cox customers would think it is either.

In addition to this phones are also sold in this department being told "its free for six months and many reps do not disclose the FCC taxes. Recently Cox was in the process of lowering internet costs to everyone but customers being solitited for phones were called weeks before and told if they get a phone their internet cost would be lowered when in reality it was a price reduction they would get anyway.

Also, hundreds of customers were paying a high internet cost when the price was lowered and were not told and others were not. Also regarding the internet customers are routinely not advised of the 3 price points available.

Many customers are not received their bundle discounts and we were paid like $2 to $10 in commission to put a bundle on if we just happened to come across one. During this process a CPNI procedure has to be followed where we speak to them and get permission to enter the account. Even if we did not get their pin numer of social security numer we had to speak to them and this almost never happened. Reason being we were all commissioned and were there for one reason, to make as much money as we could.

I know they must be violating many many FCC Guidelines and I just don't know who to report it to and would like some names of agencies that regulated, the sale of phones, digital service, inequality in billing, and the many other abuses that I have just names.

tk
Dana Point, California
U.S.A.

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