The Verge reported on April 14th that Samsung’s “Experts,” who answer consumer conversations at Samsung.com, were being pressured by Samsung and recruiting agency Ibbu to provide free customer assistance. During our reporting, we met with a dozen specialists, but only one agreed to be named in the story: Jennifer Larson.
Larson received an email the day after our story was published informing her that she had been temporarily suspended and would receive an update in a week. Ibbu informed her that she had been dismissed four weeks later.
Part of the email to Larson read:
Ibbu has found that there are reasons to terminate your account after analyzing your activity on the platform. While we respect and promote constructive input from the Ibbu community and livefeed communications, using the Ibbu platform for personal contacts is against Ibbu rules and has resulted in complaints from other community members in this situation. Furthermore, sharing confidential information about the Ibbu platform on social media and urging visitors to look at third-party links or content directly in the conversation is a significant infringement of policy and the Agreement, and is grounds for termination.
Ibbu did not immediately respond to The Verge’s request for the policies it is citing or for more information on why Larson was fired.
Larson isn’t the only one who wonders if she was fired because she spoke out. After speaking with The Verge, two more specialists said they were fired from the Samsung Mobile “mission.” Another expert, with whom we did not speak at the time but who publicly shared our story on their LinkedIn page, was also fired. They weren’t suspended before being fired, unlike Larson, and they can work on other Ibbu tasks if they wish.
To make matters worse, the “Experts” are paid solely on commission, which means they are unlikely to receive any compensation for answering support chats. Despite this, and despite the fact that their contract states that they are not allowed to answer support inquiries, the specialists we spoke with felt compelled to do so by both Ibbu and Samsung. One Samsung employee rationalized it by claiming that responding to help chats increased the experts’ customer satisfaction ratings.
For the experts, that statistic, together with the percentage of chats that turn into sales, determines whether or not they keep their positions. However, as several experts pointed out to us, it’s difficult to maintain such numbers when you’re disappointing customers by telling them they were in the wrong chat and that they need to travel to a separate section of Samsung.com to reach the right person.
Samsung did not answer to The Verge’s request for comment on whether the firm was involved in the firing of Larson and other Ibbu experts.
Aside from Larson, Ibbu terminated the experts we spoke with due to poor performance. However, more than a week after letting them go, the firm recognized in an internal document that out-of-scope chats were becoming more of a problem — albeit its estimate of 2.81 percent of talks being misrouted by bots is substantially lower than what experts told us. “Continuously working on tracking and improving this to minimize this percentage as rapidly as feasible,” the business added.
For those who have already received termination emails citing low customer satisfaction and sales metrics, this is cold consolation. This isn’t the end they wanted, but one of the former specialists told The Verge that they “have zero desire to obtain that job back with Samsung Mobile.” Another stated that they would like their job back, but that Ibbu should make significant adjustments. Both stated that they were still having trouble reaching Ibbu’s objectives.
Larson, for one, isn’t surprised she was fired, but she didn’t expect Ibbu to keep her in the dark for so long. But, when it came to speaking up about the company’s treatment of her, she said she was glad she did. “There is nothing I would alter.”
