Pros
- Work from home is always a plus - Pay is pretty decent, although for the amount of stress you're put under it should be higher. - Flexibility in terms of availability, clocking in/out, breaks etc - They offer a variety of shifts including split shifts which I thought was nice. Shift bidding based on metrics is kind of not great but I'll get into that in the cons section - They provide you with all of the hardware you need and try to make accommodations. - They do offer VTO (Voluntary Time Off) when it is slow during the day, so you can go do your own stuff instead of sitting in an empty queue (which is rare).
Cons
- Constantly understaffed. There is no reason that during the holiday season we should have only 600 people available to take calls at ANY point, regardless if others are staffed but are training or on break. - Due to understaffing, queue times are as long as 500 people by 9AM. You only have 7 seconds between calls being accepted, and you are watched HEAVILY for your metrics so you really can't get breathing room. - The company is completely dishonest about their pipeline. My training team was told we would enter phase two training within 2-3 weeks of being in production (i.e fully taking calls). Four - going on five - months later, no word on that despite it being 'required' of all employees. This training is also a requirement in order to move up the ladder, so you really are stuck at the bottom and treated poorly until they randomly decide to pull your name from the hat to get proper secondary training. - If you don't like stress or rude customers, you will struggle. This sounds a bit obvious, but not many people realize that you do not have coworkers. You have a Microsoft Teams chat, but you are sitting in a room, by yourself, helping people who may be rude or angry for nine hours. There's no real way to relieve stress like you would a normal job with coworkers around you. - You are penalized for not knowing the answer on how to help a customer and elevating them to Tier 2. This may seem necessary but escalation percentages are heavily scrutinized, even if there is a troubleshooting step that requires you to go up the chain of command. - The way their healthcare is set up is kind of weird. I don't use it as I have my own already but it was very confusing trying to wade through it and it doesn't seem very good. - The shift bidding based on your metrics is not good. Many of these metrics are arbitrary, such as if you offered to screen share, or how long your after call note taking was. - There are system issues consistently. Within half of a year, there have been many instances of tools not working, not being able to troubleshoot correctly, systems randomly going down. This is to the point where you could not pull up anything in your system to troubleshoot issues for the customer, and yet we were still told we needed to be taking calls. There were even people REVIEWING these calls and telling us we needed to fix our issues. Those reviews affect our metrics, and being forced to take calls when literally none of your tools work means that you will get a bad customer survey, another thing that affects your metrics. - This company seems to believe they are the CIA, and are so heavy on security. You can have zero electronics in the room with you, no paper, pens, anything to write with or on, no drinks, no food, absolutely zero background noise (one dog bark from a neighbors dog and you get written up if the customer notices), and no animals are allowed in your room. This is the most restrictive at-home job I have seen or heard of in a long time, and it's honestly kind of baffling.