I worked for Charter as a tier 3 tech support specialist about 10 years ago now, and towards the end of my time there we were trained in a program called "Purchase Power". It started off as something that everyone on the phones, regardless of position or nature of the call, was "encouraged" to do and basically involved reviewing all the services on the account with the customer and point out changes that could be made to save them money, like bundle services they already had going, point out promotional rates, etc. After a month or so of this, it was turned into a non-optional thing that consisted of roughly 50% of the call score when it came to review time. If a rep in any department didn't at least make an attempt to review services with a customer calling in for any reason, it had the potential to result in a write-up if it happened in a call that was randomly pulled during a performance review since it was impossible to receive a "passing" call score under this system unless these guidelines were adhered to. "Service reviews" quickly became sales as the requirements were again modified to include trying to sell new services. "Overcome the customer's objections" was, verbatim, a category that calls were graded on during reviews. This posed an extremely.. interesting.. challenge for my team as the higher-tier support staff were dealing primarily with repeat issues that the lower-tier teams had failed to diagnose properly or fix properly. And yet we were expected to try to sell higher speed internet connections, HBO, phone service, or anything else to these customers that were calling in repeatedly because the service they already had were not working for sometimes months at a time. Not long after I left for a new position that didn't make me feel like a sleazy car salesman on a daily basis, I learned that my entire team ended up getting dissolved and the people that hadn't already voluntarily left were given the choice of moving into other departments (customer retention or sales, primarily), or to go be successful elsewhere. So now, in our region at least, there is no tier 2 or tier 3 tech support out there to this day.
The most sickening part of all of this though, from the perspective of someone who worked with it first-hand, was the internal fervor behind refusing to call Purchase Power a sales program. It was always about "satisfying" the customer, calling it a sales program was extremely taboo even in internal conversation among employees, and telling customers about the program, calling it by name, or telling them we were "required" to do it was an offense that could lead to termination.
From my experiences dealing with other telcos as a customer over the years, I've heard the telltale signs of this breed of training from reps in almost all of them. What starts as an innocent "lets take a look at the services you have with us" is the opening line these programs train their reps to use, which will soon be followed by inquiring about what you like or use the most with the services, highlighting some other service or bundle you don't have, "overcoming the customer's objections", and then trying to sell you something. I've heard it from Charter, AT&T, and Time Warner first-hand and I know from my own personal experience that this has been a trend in the industry at-large for at least a decade now.