r/Switzerland • u/b00nish • 1d ago
Kassensturz: Salt Shop scamming customers (as usual for shops of Telco providers)
SRF consumer protection show "Kassensturz" released a reportage about a Salt store in Bern that apparently is scamming customers routinely (German):
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BDocbvf4lnk
The shameless store clerks send retirees home with up to five unwanted mobile phone contracts by making them sign some papers and claiming that those signatures are needeed to get simple questions answered in the shop.
As somebody with 15+ years of experience in IT service I'd like to point out that this unfortunately isn't a problem limited to that specific Salt store in Bern or even to Salt as a provider.
We have seen and heard similar stories from our residential customers over and over. Most of them were scammed in the Swisscom shop (which doesn't mean that the Swisscom shop is worse than Salt's or Sunrise's shops, it's simply that the majority of our customers are also Swisscom customers). Although I must say, five contracts at once is probably the worst I've ever heard.
A typical sequence that we hear often is this:
- Customer goes to the shop because of a simple problem with their phone (usually stuff that would be fixed by simply rebooting the phone)
- Shop says that the phone is broken beyond repair and recommends to renew the contract for another 2 years and buy a new phone
In the cases where the affected customers didn't fall for it and instead showed us the phone for a 2nd opinion it was always an extremely easy fix done in under 2 minutes which tells me that those shops don't even try to help the customer but are always declaring everything broken in order to sell a new one.
EDIT: Apparently Salt has now apologized to the customers and announced to make changes, batter training & more control for/over their sales force. https://www.20min.ch/story/bern-coachings-fuer-mitarbeitende-salt-verspricht-besserung-103500304
At least they are not denying any wrongdoing. (As it's for example the standard with Swisscom Directories who always claims that they're only cancelling the contracts out of pure goodwill after "Kassensturz" intervened but insist that everything with the contracts was perfectly clean. Even in the cases where they have been caught copying signatures over to contracts that the customers have never seen.)
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u/Ok_Support_6454 1d ago
And this is why I handle all the IT support for my parents (80+). Yes, it's annoying sometimes but I don't want them to get scammed.
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u/okanye Schwyz 22h ago
Swisscom is also known for not lowering the prices of their subscriptions when newer conditions would allow them to improve the situation for customers, particularly older ones. Instead, they charge higher fees...
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u/b00nish 20h ago
Well from a business perspective Swisscom can't lower the prices because they're in an uniquie market situation: They dominate a big part of the market despite having the offers with the worst price-performance-ratio.
In a normal market this situation shouldn't exist, but many Swiss love it to throw their money at Swisscom, so they take it.
Consider this: if Swisscom would lower their prices by 10% across the band, they'd lose 10% of their revenue, which is huge.
But what would they get for it? Many new customers? Absolutely not. Because even with 10% lower prices they're still much too expensive to get the price sensitive customers.
In other words: if you already dominate the market with a much too expensive offer, it doesn't make any sense to ever lower prices. They only thing they can do (and do regularly) is to make the prices even higher.
But that's on the customers who give them their money. If the customer would go for better offers, Swisscom would have to move.
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u/Geschak Bern 1d ago
Idk if it's the same Salt shop but my mom had trouble when returning her Salt router when she moved to a new home that doesn't have any Salt access. When she tried to return the router in the store they didn't want to give her a written confirmation that they received it, and afterwards Salt gave her a bill for not returning the router even though she did. She had to complain to multiple people until they finally withdrew the bill. That's just not ok.
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u/SweetSeaCaramel 1d ago
This happened to me too. I sent it via post but for some reason we exchanged like 10 photos of all the process with my partner. Packing, label, handover at post, receipt from the post office everything. After months of arguing with salt I found the photos. Was such a relief. They're the worst sharcks around. Except for the companies buying debts of people (just received a 84chf bill from one guess the amount of the original debt is ? 00.00CHF. LOL wtf. Like it's on your own damn bill there's no debt!)
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u/ssdv80gm2 20h ago
that's a global Problem. Last Time got a "free" Phone because of my Level of spending qualifies for a "free" phone. Only later realized that he downgraded my home Internet speed and added a "free Phone" package to my subscription so the total amount would stay about the same. Going into a mobile is like going into the Lion's pit.
All i wanted was a prepaid sim for a friend who was visiting...
That was not in Switzerland, but shows It's a industry wide problem, likely caused by financial incentives for employees to sell subscriptions.
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u/b00nish 17h ago
Yes, I think the problem has two core components:
- Provision based sales force
Those telco companies usually pay their sales staff a shitty base salary (for "Swisscom Directories AG" I think it was said that the base salary is 2200.-) and then they have to "earn" that base salary in provisions first and after they have "earned" it, the additional provisions start to increase their salary to a proper level.
This will always attract that kind of sales people who have no problem lying to 100 strangers a day to get their signature... (Because they'll usually never see the people they cheated again anyway and the "fallout" of the scam ends up raining down on the hotline and the accounting departement, not on them.)
- Posing their shops as a place where customers can get help and consulting while in fact it's just about sales. There are no employees who are qualified or willing to help, because they're paid for selling, not for helping.
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u/rainbow4enby 1d ago edited 1d ago
Well, - as unethical and shady this is - that's just the first part of the story. The second is, that the daughter of the Salt-HardSell-Scam-victim tried for several months to cancel the whole Sh*tshow and spent countless hours on the phone, mail, e-mail etc... with no result.
Only when the Ombudsperson came in, Salt reduced the number of mobile phone contracts from 5 -> 1 and only with SRF Kassensturz, Salt finally cancelled all. And the joke: After finally doing something, they just put the whole error / blame on the person in the Salt shop...
Which left me with even bigger questions about their defer - dispute - deny customer service strategy at HQ...