Working in Retention is absolutely not a good job. In order to be successful, you need to separate yourself from the work and not be phased by things like conscience. You also need to hustle your proverbial rear-end off, as the metrics you need to hit in order to have any kind of job stability are not attainable without offsetting your losses with sales, something which hinges directly on your ability to de-escalate angry calls and convince people that are already upset with a high bill that increasing it by $10-$20 is a good thing. You'll also need sales to offset the number of losses you'll take on a daily basis to things that you have zero ability to control, such as Move Out of Area's, deaths, and people switching providers because they've called multiple times and no one wants to take a hit to their numbers by helping the customer (translation: previous reps Sold the Value of the customers services) and so they decided to go with a provider that will save them money.
The fact that you'll be held accountable for your actions is supposed to be a deterrent to avoid shady dealings, but in practice you'll still end up taking hits to your numbers by Doing Whats Right because you'll still end up taking calls from people that cancelled their services months ago but yet are still being billed because reps will go through the motions and not actually process the change so as to avoid the hit to their numbers (a fireable offense, but little consolation to you).
No one wants to admit it, but a great deal of the job boils down to luck of the draw. When the phone clicks over to a customer, you have no idea what you'll be getting on that call. It could be a standard "lower my bill" call.... or it could be a "I'm moving to China" (Move out of Area) call.... or it could be a "I want to add HBO" call... or anything else. You will have great days where you walk out of the call center feeling like a God because you ended the day only loosing $150-$200 and didn't lose any products. Then there will be your average day where you'll lose around $300-$500 and anywhere from 2-5 products. And then you'll have those days where luck has abandoned you and you'll lose anywhere from $950-$1200 and 10+ products.
How successful you are depends entirely on how lucky you are and how good you are at hustling. If you are better at hustling than you are at getting lucky, then you'll do fine. If you rely solely on luck because you aren't good at hustling, then you will not be successful in Retention because, despite the job saying "Retention Agent", your job is sales. You just happen to be selling services that people already have instead of selling services that people don't yet have. And if you rely on luck, as I found myself doing more often than not, then you will find yourself on a slowly sinking ship.
