Decent Pay and Benefits But at a Heavy Cost. - Customer Service Representative (CSR) Capital One Employee Review

*Hard to advance *Impossible metrics/goals to achieve which makes the job and servicing customers stressful forcing you to make hard choices at times which include servicing the customers and making them happy at the cost of your metrics or cutting corners and screwing over the customer which is good for your metrics but leaves the customers unhappy and frustrated. These situations where you are forced to compromise your quality of service to keep your job can be really draining and can get to people with high moral codes/values. Either way you are risking your job if your metrics are low due to high call or hold times due to difficult calls or you get caught trying to game the system to "improve your metrics" by screwing over the customers. *Lack of ability to do certain things for customers due to policy restrictions making your job more difficult. *Endless security checks when servicing customers making you and the customer frustrated and stressed. Sometimes these security checks do not work or accept customers phone number for verification. Few to no alternatives for customers who are not tech savvy. *Rude, angry and demanding customers which will stress you out and give you major anxiety. *Training was terrible we only had two weeks to learn a years worth of banking regulations and procedures before we were thrown to the wolves for "more training" aka taking nesting calls. The training period was subpar at best and did not really cover how to do our job properly nor how to deal with back to back angry and frustrated callers. *Back to back calls with barley a minute to breath or regain your composure after stressful calls makes the job very draining and easy to get burned out on. *You work at home so there is a lack of support for stressed or frustrated agents due to the disconnect between your teammates, manager and other employees who might be on the other side of the country from where you are located. *When stuck on a call you are told to depend on your resources these resources include an article database full of scripts that don't answer certain questions or demands customers have and are huge walls of texts that contain word salad that doesn't explain anything that could help the customer. You are allowed to reach out to your peers and teammates for assistance on calls but do not expect an answer most of the time as they are often busy with their own calls or it is their day off and they are unreachable. You will often only hear from your peers and teammates on how to resolve the call long after the call has already been resolved and the information might be inaccurate or misleading.. *Other resources for assistance include reaching out to a help chat line or a manager phone line. Many "supervisors" in the help chat line, or employees in other departments that you need assistance from and the manager phone line are just as clueless as you and they have no answers to your questions, give you pushback or refuse to take your call, leave you on an endless hold, or hang up on you/ randomly disconnect the chat which leaves you stuck on a call even when they are attempting to solve the problem together with you on a call it can take forever which leaves the customer frustrated and effects your hold time/call time metrics. Also you cannot transfer a customer over to a supervisor unless they specifically request it so if both you and the customer are stuck and they don't ask for a supervisor you are stuck on the call because you will be penalized for cold transferring the calls to supervisors or transferring a call to a supervisor when the customer did not request it but you have no other options to assist them. *Calls that you are not supposed to take are routed to your que and you are expected to service the call even if it was an invalid transfer because the customer called the wrong department, employee transferred to the wrong department or the employee warm or cold transferred the call to you to avoid dealing with an angry or frustrated customer. *You are expected to take calls you were not trained on like tech support or IT calls even though your only supposed to be a customer service rep. There is no front end or back end training for these kind of calls nor any options to screenshare with the customer to get a better handle on their tech issue you are kind of expected to just figure it out. You can be penalized for transferring the customer to the tech support department as they handle more internal matters and are not customer facing. *Alot of tasks or things customers and management want you to do are things you were not trained on and you could be penalized and still held accountable for making mistakes regardless if you were trained for it or not. *Alot of system and tech issues with the equipment causing calls to drop or crash, customers being unable to hear you or you being unable to hear the customers through the headset or the audio quality is really bad and all of this affects the ability to do your job properly. Before you can contact the IT department for assistance you are expected to do troubleshooting on your own time which can be difficult for people who are not tech savvy or have little to no tech training. *Company seems like it could care less about its customers and just wants their money. Many changes they make to policies or accounts they poorly communicate or do not communicate to their customers at all in advance. Causing these customers to justifiably call in and be mad at you and you have to suck it up and deal with it. * They are generous with their PTO and vacation but make it impossible to use it because its a first come and first served basis and if you try to use PTO for events or important situations there's a chance it could not be approved forcing you to call out which they take PTO hours out for and could penalize you for if you call out too much. In other situations it takes forever for them to approve PTO and there is no guarantee you will get your requested time off even if you book it well in advance. *They do offer voluntarily time off (VTO) but its unpaid time off unless you apply your PTO hours, VTO is first come and first served and depending on your schedule your VTO request can be denied due to staffing issues leaving you stressed when you have to do other things or you don't feel like working the rest of the day due to the stress of this job. *Extremely difficult to change schedules or advance into a position off the phones. If you realize there is no way off the phones and you do not want to work as a customer service rep you are better off lining something else up and leaving the company. *Due to the stress, demands and nature of the job there is high turnover. I have seen many old and new employees and management come and go in only six months with this role in the company. I am on my way out soon and out of my training class of 20 people 4 people have already left and others besides myself are making plans to leave after lining up other jobs and we graduated from training only six months ago. *When it comes to your TL (Team Leader) aka manager you will either have a micromanager who nitpicks and criticizes everything you do despite giving your best effort with brutal and demanding customers or you will have a manager who could care less about you, will be away in "meetings" most of the time and you will only hear from them if they need something or if they are "coaching you" or letting you go. You are often coached or disciplined/written up on mistakes you didn't know you were making because training didn't cover it or explain it in any way. *If you get too many write up's by a micromanaging supervisor it will become nearly impossible to remain satisfied at the job because your chances of getting off the phones, transferring to a different department/team, getting a different schedule or doing anything besides taking calls becomes nearly impossible forcing you into situations where you would either have to quit your job or risk a termination. If you are going to work here at Capital One Bank as a customer service rep please read everything I wrote above and proceed with caution. Determine for yourself if a job like this is worth it for you because while I gave it my best effort it ended up being not worth it for me in the end despite the golden handcuffs they have provided me and to many others hoping we would stick around in a job like this.