Pros
The people on my team were wonderful, and I’ve made friends for life - we bonded over how awful the job was and the relief after we left.
Cons
This is toxic, toxic environment for Technical Support Advisors. Do not be tempted to take this role if offered. It will grind you down in a way I didn’t know a job could. I would challenge you to find a single happy employee in this role, as every colleague of mine has either left due to the working environment, or has been on long term sick with stress caused by the job. The training is based more on how to use the software, rather than fixing issues which is 90% of the calls you take. The problems continue when you get onto Gradbay - they use a glide path system where targets become increasingly difficult week by week, until they become impossible. Unrealistic targets for Adherence, handle time, CSAT, after call work, as well as many more stats are used as a rod to beat you with. The culture at Sage is nothing short of abusive and cruel. Staff retention is GradBay is a disaster, with good reason. Even managers are miserable, most likely due to being pressured by THEIR managers to get impossible results from a team with rock bottom morale. The hyper critical coaching style and micromanagement makes you feel like you’re completely useless if you’re not generating revenue for them on every call or pushing ‘self serve’ to paying customers. The intense focus is always on getting through as many calls as possible and to generate as many sales leads as possible means that you cannot deliver customer service and tech support to increasingly angry customers who are paying for the privilege of calling. My day would begin with tears and genuine panic attacks as I joined my morning huddle, which came to feel like a ‘name and shame’ opportunity for those who had ‘let the team down’ by taking too long handling calls, and those hadn’t met their sales targets the previous day. Abuse from customers - screaming, swearing, personal remarks about your intelligence and personality - is not only tolerated, but the dedicated Customer Complaints team would rather lay the blame on the technician for ‘not taking control of the call’ and refuse to send out warning letters to repeatedly abusive customers. Hanging up on a screaming, abusive customer is classed as ‘call avoidance’ so will land you in hot water. The ‘internal channels’ for reporting problems that are so often mentioned in by Sage in their Glassdoor responses are non-existent. I’m not sure exactly what I would even say on them if they did exist - Sage has a culture problem. These issues aren’t something that can be fixed by putting a comment in a suggestion box.
