Fidelity Investments reviews

I found a review from about five years ago and it hit most of the points that I want to hit, so I'm using it as a basis here; it's discouraging to see that so little has changed with this role at this company in a five-year span. It's an indication of how absolutely oblivious upper management is to the situation on the ground. 1. Heavy volume of calls- there is NO pause between calls on many days. It's ridiculous to expect people to provide excellent customer service for an eight or ten hour shift when the volume is that heavy. 2. You will be micro-managed. Even if you're intelligent enough to make decisions that are best for the customer, you'll be told to do it according to the protocol, which a good deal of the time doesn't make any sense. 3. You will feel like a robot. You have to follow Fidelity's robotic call structure; miss any element of that and an excellent call becomes 'satisfactory' according to the judgement of "Quality," the Big Brother of Fidelity who evaluate calls. It is EXTREMELY demoralizing to feel like you have done an amazing job and that customers were happy with your service, but Fidelity is going to find a thousand things to criticize you on. 4. You are expected to know (or know how to locate) massive amounts of information. You will be asked obscure questions, and you'll have to sort through electronic encyclopedias of financial information to attempt to find the answer. 5. Customers get screwed over all the time. Somebody taking a $150 payout from their 401K has to pay the same $25 withdrawal fee as someone who's taking out $100K. Want tracking with your rollover check (Fidelity doesn't do direct rollovers)? You're going to pay $25 for that too. There are "recordkeeping fees" on most 401Ks. It's a racket.

Some managers expect for you to be perfect at everything. I was told that everything needs to be perfect. The job that they advertised was nothing compared to what you have to deal with. Training is 11 weeks long and you read and watch videos. There are no dummy accounts so you can't practice unless it's on a live account. You really can't move up in a position unless you've been in your current one for 2 years. Our lunches are only 30 mins and granted you get 2 15 min breaks but its hard to unwind mentally on just 30 mins. If a customer writes a bad review on you whether it was the customer's fault it's on you. Also, we were just told in training that if we ask a team for help with a question and they give us the wrong answer and we tell the customer the answer, it's our fault. We'll get in trouble and possibly written up. They want us to "predict" or "know" that the answer the team lead gives us is right.