Inadequate training-If you want to have a chance at succeeding at this job, you'd better make sure that your IQ is above 140 becuase you will be rebuked for asking questions. Furthermore, if you have questions, very often nobody will be available to answer your questions anyway and the resources that are provided to you will not have the information either, so, if you need to ask a question, sorry, you're on your own. Also, the ING Field Agents that we speak to on the phone are very often poorly trained and just as clueless about company policies and procedures and IRS Rules regarding retirement plans as the customer. Which brings me to:
Poor Communication amongst all the parties of ING's retirment plans: Very often the plan managers that make the agreements with the Sponsors don't communicate to the Sponsors, the local Field Agents, or the Home Office about how to instruct the customer on how to go about making a desired transaction. For example, we receive instrutions that we need to refer the customer to the employer for a given transaction and the employer doesn't know what to do, so they refer them to the local Agent who in turn refers them to the Home Office, where, consequently, many of our phone calls are from customers who are clueless about what to do and feel they are "getting the runaround" because nobody knows what's going on. I've never run a business (yet), but I do know that you can't run a business this way.
Technology-This company hasn't joined the 21st Century. If you are a participant in a retirment plan with ING, you can't do a lot online. Want to change your address or phone number? Take money out? Sorry, you can't do that online. You have to call and do it over the phone or for most "money out" transactions you have to fill out paperwork and then obtain you employer's (or former employer's) signature. And once you submit the paperwork (again, only fax and snail mail availlable) you had better not forget to sign the paperwork, otherwise you'll have to go through the whole paperwork process again. When I told the carrier of a 401k I had through a previous employer tha't I wanted to roll it over, they said, 'OK, give us the address over the phone and we'll mail the check" They didn't make me fill out paperwork or get my former employer's signature and from what I've heard, neither do ING's major competitors, which brings me to the next problem...
Malicious and Mafia-like Management. You managers evaluate you according to your numbers, so be prepared to be treated like one-In light of all the unnecessarily complicated procedures, you'd better make sure that you make no mistakes, because they they will have no patience with you. Even if you are doing a good job in the majority of areas, if you have even just one metric that isn't in line with their arbitrary numbers and measurments that they choose, your meetings with your manager will be more like meetings with The Godfather. This ties in with what I said about training-they expect you have it all in your head when you start the job and if you hang in there for 4 months they will expect you to do your job as good as someone who has been doing it for 4 years.
