Find today’s video here:
You can read the methods section of the paper I discussed in the video below:
Research setting
DeskSales was created to reduce the cost of sale at M-Tel. Before DeskSales, M-Tel used field salespeople to sell all the products in its portfolio to its 100 largest corporate customers. The problem of doing so was cost. M-Tel estimated that a field salesperson costed $250 per customer contact whereas a desk salesperson costed $2.50 per customer contact. DeskSales was set up to reduce the cost of sale by taking away the smaller sales from field salespeople. DeskSales was led by a general manager who saw herself as “the salesperson for ‘the desk’ [ie. DeskSales]” within M-Tel. Five years after DeskSales was launched she was offered a position in the company’s board of directors. Her success at the head of DeskSales was due to her ability to deliver on her cost and revenue goals. To cut costs, she hired desk salespeople with very little work experience and redundant employees from M-Tel’s service units. To increase revenue, she imposed a demanding sales targets on desk salespeople.
Desk salespeople and their service work. Desk salespeople found even simple products such as ADSL connections (broadband internet access at home) difficult to sell because of their limited sales experience. As their sales began to lag behind their targets, their supervisors told them to take on their customers’ service issues to become “their customer’s central point of contact.” The goal was to educate customers to rely on desk salespeople when they needed help with their existing M-Tel products, and especially when they needed to place orders. Desk salespeople could then report these orders as their own sales, earning their bonus and pushing their managers’ careers ahead. At the end of DeskSales’ first year, an internal report showed that one in every two calls that desk salespeople took came from customers placing service requests. Three in every five of the remaining calls were from service representatives updating desk salespeople on outstanding service issues. This report stated that desk salespeople were involved in two thirds of all service issues in that year. This subtle form of deviance ensured that desk salespeople received some of the largest bonuses in M-Tel’s salesforce and helped their unit surpass its sales target.
These were difficult accomplishments. Desk salespeople did not have the training nor the permission to do most service work. They needed M-Tel’s service representatives to do it for them. However, service units were only supposed to take requests from customers or other service units and thus had a legitimate reason to refuse desk salespeople’s requests for help.
M-Tel’s service units. M-Tel’s service units were geographically separated from DeskSales and their communication channels limited desk salespeople’s ability to build social ties with service representatives. Service units managed their work through a first-in-first-out (FIFO) system. Service requests arrived at a central email address for each service unit. There was also a central phone number (called the ‘helpline’) for each unit. Customers could call this number to ask questions and get updates on their service issues. The only possibility of direct communication with service representatives was through their direct phone numbers used to obtain information for outstanding service tasks. Service representatives were responsible for turning emails and calls into service requests that were added to a database called “the bucket” in M-Tel’s lingo. They were required to address the requests that had been in the “bucket” for the longest time.
DeskSales is a unique context to study how employees use of technology that replaces interaction to enlist the help of others. On the one hand, the stakes that desk salespeople had in service work were high. It was their main source of revenue, the best opportunity to earn their bonus and to maintain their job in the unit. On the other hand, they had to overcome cumbersome technologies that replaced interaction which were difficult obstacles to enforce compliance with their service requests. This tension turns DeskSales into a research setting that amplifies the challenges and opportunities for using technology to enlist the help of others and thus exposes processes that may go unnoticed in less demanding contexts.
Here’s the example of the practice that I discussed in the video:
A third practice consisted of finding service representatives with a compliant disposition and send them every request that could be addressed by their service unit. To do so, desk salespeople collected the phone numbers of service representatives who had been expedient and helpful in responding to requests posted to their unit in the past, much like desk salesperson Melissa did when she received a complaint from a customer about a delay in a private circuit installation. She sent an email to the private circuit service unit and attempted to address it to service representative Frances by introducing her name in the subject field and in the first line of the message (see ‘send messages to cooperative service representatives’ in table 2). When asked if she knew Frances, she replied:
No, I came across her when I was changing all the circuits for BigRetailer a few months ago. […] When my orders landed on her inbox, I always got the OPC [a message confirming that an order was completed] in the same day and sometimes in less than an hour! […] Now if I have anything for them [the service unit dealing with private circuits], I try to send it her way.
This explanation suggests the expectation that some service representatives were more compliant with customers’ requests forwarded to them by desk salespeople. It suggests that there is persuasive potential (and not only threats to persuasion attempts) in people’s appropriation of the positional power of others. Desk salespeople tapped into the susceptibility of service representatives by taking advantage of the way in which M-Tel set up communication technology in the service department. The use of a central email address to submit requests allowed desk salespeople the opportunity to find helpful service representatives. Notice that, in this practice, desk salespeople did not try to establish personal ties with service representatives. Instead they improvised with central email addresses to convey requests for help to service representatives that appropriated the positional power of customers by addressing customers’ requests.
Here’s one of the tables I discuss in the video:
