I'd say there's something fishy when an interviewee asks about salary and doesn't get a straight answer then and there. That's a legitimate question and getting the brushoff on it would make me wonder how much cooperation I'd get as CSR in terms of office time to do the work as opposed to info & reg backup, which is what my store's CSR gets stuck with most of the time.

The strength of the CSR's paycheck is in the bonuses. Make the sales goals, get bonuses. the CSR bonus can be up to $500, though I can't remember the specifics. Plus the difference between being full-time and part-time... 75 cents more an hour isn't much, until you're also getting 35 hours instead of 15...

Is it corporate sales rep? Our store is looking for one of those too, but once people find out how much it pays and how much work is involved, they say "no thanks". Even our managers joke about how crappy that position is!

This is my new screen name, but I used to be ribookseller who started this thread. Since a few people responded, let me give you the view from several months of experience as a CSR. Yes, it is the Corporate Sales Representative, although the corporate sales program has been renamed the Group Savings & Services Program. I took the job and was offered $1.75 an hour over what I was making as a bookseller; that's well above what several people told me I would get as an increase. Every store has a different plan or goal for the CSR. In my case I am supposed to generate about $160,000 in business every year. That doesn't sound too hard when you are making big sales to schools, businesses, and churches, right?

Here's the reality. Ingram and B&T are both beating our discounts for their school and library customers on most books. I lost a big sale of several hundred books to a hospital recently because their purchasing department took the time to go to the publisher's website and got a much larger discount than Borders allows me to give.

Yeah, it's nice to sit in the back office and not have to deal with all the customers, but I'm expected to drop everything and answer back-up calls all day. When the store makes 103% of plan and everyone gets a bonus, I don't. Because CSRs have their own bonus plans, they can't participate in store bonus plans.

Bonus plan. That sounds nice. Here's the reality: if I make goal for the month I get $100. If I make goal plus 10% plus $5000, I get $200. That means if my goal is $5000 for the month, I have to make roughly $10.500 to get $200. If I hope to make the whole $500 bonus that is available every month, I would have to sell almost $50,000 in a month where the goal was $5000. Almost nobody makes bonus and those that do make bonus rarely make more $100 in any one month. Unfortunately for me, I was interviewed by the previous GM who either didn't understand the bonus system or lied to me because that's not the way it was explained to me.

Look at the field job postings and see how many CSR positions are open. They're open because it is virtually impossible to meet plan. If you think I'm stomping sour grapes, check out the sales reports on Einfo. For fiscal 2005 which ended in January, more than 60% of the CSRs company-wide did not make plan for the year. If 10 or 15% were not making annual plans, I would agree they weren't trying. When 60% aren't making plan, the plan is too high and too unrealistic. To show how ridiculous the Ann Arborites are about this, we've been told our fiscal 2006 plans (which we probably won't see until April, two months into the fiscal year) will be about 4 to 6 percent higher than last year. Sixty percent of the CSRs did not make plan and Ann Arbor responds to that by raising the plan? Does anyone look at all the figures they generate up there?

Yeah, it's nice to work days and it's nice to have weekends off and it's nice to make a bit more than sellers. But right now it's appraisal time at Borders and my GM has to fail me on my appraisal because 70% of the appraisal score for a CSR falls on one question: did the CSR make plan? If the answer is no, the score is 1 on a scale of 1 to 5. Theoretically, just over 60% of us should fail our appraisals and we should all be fired. Will Ann Arbor direct that? I doubt it. CSRs generate about 4% of the total Borders sales company-wide. It takes a year or more for someone to feel comfortable in the position and really start generating dollars and coming close to meeting plan. Borders won't send all of us to the scrapheap because they need that 4% of total sales we generate.

If anyone is thinking about taking a CSR job, go talk to four or five existing CSRs and get them to talk to you honestly. I bet if you talked to five, you'd find three who would tell you straight out to go find another job. Then talk to a CSR field trainer and see how many stores they are responsible for and how many people they have trained in the last year. I bet the field trainer has trained 50% of the CSR staff in the stores they cover in the last year.

Ann Arbor sets you up for failure in this job. Most GMs that I've seen or heard about, give little or no thought to the CSR except at the the end of the month when they haven't made plan. My GM promised me a weekly meeting. Monthly is more like it and I consider that I have a good GM. Truth is, GMs are too busy to take much interest in a program that only generates 3 or 4 percent of their top and bottom lines. The customer actually coming through the door is more important than the one ordering a couple of hundred dollars over the phone.

I wanted to make this job work. Four months in and I realize Borders is not going to give me the tools to make it work. My hard work is one tool and I've already been recognized by Ann Arborites for hard work, but I also need resources in the form of a budget, Internet access, a modern email program rather than the dinosaur I'm stuck with, a computer that was at least made in the 21st century, realistic discounts that let me compete with publishers and the big distributors, and support from the staff when I'm stuffing 500 envelopes like I am now for Educator's Weekend.

The job sounds great when it's sold to you folks, but the reality for most of us is different. I applaud the 40% of CSRs who are making goal. You're doing a great job for a lousy salary. I was making this much money 30 years ago when I came out of college and took my first corporate job. Unless the existing CSR has a great clientele built up (the previous CSR here didn't), keep looking for another job. Existing CSRs will tell you it will take 2 or more years to build up a good client base. Chances are you'll be burned out with back up calls to the floor by that time.

I'm actually suprised they didn't eliminate this position entirely after the last round of restructuring. I guess Binc still needs someone to blame for their unrealistic sales goals in this area.I remember back in the day the Cafe cost of goods was as impossible to stay within as these corporate sales goals are to meet. Binc's solution was to basically sell the the cafe business off to Starbucks aka Seattle's Best. Binc will claim they've merely (partnered) with Seattle's Best, but the end result is the same for the employees, much as they couldn't make money running Borders.com so they sold it(I mean partnered with Amazon) off to Amazon in exchange for a portion of the profits.My prediction is that as soon as everyone at Binc gets tired of pointing the finger at the CSR's and the GM's to a lesser extent the position will go away one way or another. Music sales aren't doing well either for the past couple of years, so I'm sure it's on the horizon too. Strawberries, Coconuts and a few other names come to mind as potential (partners). Also remember binc doesn't really want you to make bonus. Perhaps that's not well stated. They want you to make the numbers for them,but they don't want to give you anything for doing so. Sometimes they (meaning GM's on up the ladder) seem to behave as though they've failed somehow if a person or store meets or exceeds the goals they've been given. We must have set the bar too low, rather than this person or store did well. Just my observations in my store. Perhaps others have more positive experiences to share.