Company: Apple
Date: 2015-02-02
Overall rating: 2/5
Employment status: former
Experience level: Junior

Technical support is a sales position.
Pros: I worked there for about two years doing technical support. For maybe the first year, it was pretty great. There was plenty of training, good benefits, pay was decent. Fixing customer problems was the main focus of the job, and I was doing very well at that. We also could sell items to customers, but that was just a useful way to order them a part or cable or disc they needed without having to shuffle them to a salesperson. Sales was not a focus. I wouldn't have taken the job otherwise, because I have no skill at all at sales, and it's something I absolutely loathe doing.
Cons: After about a year, things changed. Suddenly technical support agents were pressured to make sales. Another month later and we had sales quotas we were expected to meet, though we earned no commission. Another month or so later, and sales was the main focus the call-center. All department or team meetings were now about sales, all discussions with management were about how to sell more, and any performance awards given out were for making sales. At one point my supervisor made her team fill out a form after any technical support call where they didn't make a sale, where we had to explained why we had failed to do our job... because SALES was our job now, the technical assistance was just something we had to do between pushing products on the callers.

Also, the entire Apple call-center had no windows. I always wondered if that was some kind of architecture-based pun.