I worked in a call center for Walmart Spark workers. I got reprimanded for giving drivers tips they had earned, and most calls were frustrating and scripted

• Drivers for Walmart's Spark delivery service call its support line when they have problems.
• One person who fielded those calls said missing tips were among the biggest reasons drivers called in.
• Seeing how little Spark drivers made, plus having to use scripted answers, made the job hard, the employee said.

This as-told-to essay is based on a conversation with Dominique Anderson, a former resolution coordinator in North Carolina who fielded support calls from Walmart Spark drivers. She left the job in January after just over a year of working for Walmart. Business Insider has verified her identity and past employment. The story has been edited for length and clarity.

As soon as I started, we did training for a week via Zoom, and then I started taking those calls. It's a work-at-home job, but my first week, I was working seven days, 16 hours a day because they needed someone to work overtime.

I remember one call. It was a shooting incident in Virginia. I got a call from a driver that was actually in the store shopping a pretty big order as the shooting happened. He had to cancel the order. As soon as a driver cancels an order, they get paid just $2.50. I think about that guy — about him going home, how he had a traumatic experience, and he didn't even get paid. Another time, a shopper was being held at gunpoint by a customer. It was just a lot.

I worked at what they call "Tier 2" for Spark support. Tier 1 is usually for people who are bilingual. They're the first people that Spark drivers get when they call support. They're outsourced and a lot of them have broken English, or they just don't want to deal with the call, so they'll switch them to us.

Eventually, I moved up to Tier 3, which means you can also deal with fraud causes. You get paid a couple more dollars an hour, and you can train someone.

There were a few reasons why Spark drivers would call our support line. One was that they didn't get paid what they were supposed to, especially when it came to the tip.

Spark customers often tell the drivers that they tipped. Still, I would get calls from drivers — and customers, although we weren't supposed to get customers on that line — saying that they were standing right there with the customer but they didn't get the tip that the customer had left in the app.

If I logged into Walmart's payment system, I could see how much money Walmart gets and how much the driver gets. Sometimes, the tips would go to Walmart instead of the driver.

When that happened, we were supposed to tell the driver to call back in 48 hours to see if it had been resolved. But sometimes, I would have the same people calling back a week later, and nothing had changed.

Sometimes, I would go ahead and add a tip in for the driver. We are not supposed to do that all the time, but there is a way that we can go and add the tip in to somebody's account through a "missed payment" spreadsheet. I got written up two times after doing that. After you get a third, that's it, so I just went ahead and left on my own.

In this economy, every penny matters to everybody. I don't care if it's $8.50, I'm going to put that $8.50 on their account.

Another reason drivers would call: They had shopped a big order for two hours, and after they loaded their cart, the order was automatically canceled. There was one lady I'll never forget. She had her five kids with her. She was doing her last delivery of the day. It's already at 8 or 8:30 at night. She had a huge order, and when she got to the customer's house, it got canceled.

I've had a lot of people call me late night like that, and they're like, "Well, what am I supposed to do?" Sometimes the stores would not take the groceries back. A lot of times, I've been able to just send people home with bags of groceries. What was I supposed to tell that lady? "Hey, you got to drive all the way back across town?" It's been that way with electronics, too, because some stores will not take anything back.

Some people would also call in about the Spark drivers using multiple accounts. We were trained to say something like: "Well, Mr. Such-and-such, one driver's experience is not a good way to gauge another's." They would complain about seeing people claim two or three orders at once while they got nothing.

Technically, drivers aren't supposed to do that. But there's nothing I can do for that. I can deactivate someone's account or reactivate it, but nobody knows who these people are.

You can't not be empathetic in some of these situations. I couldn't believe how hard they rode over a few dollars when people are calling in complaining about how they can't pay their bills or how they can't afford gas. I was just over it, so I left.

A Walmart spokesperson told BI: "Our driver support agents are invaluable, and they provide tremendous support to drivers on the Spark Driver platform. We have detailed processes and materials in place that outline how support agents should respond to and assist drivers with questions and concerns, which are standardized for all agents."

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