While it’s true that the company is growing and, in terms of technology, they are on the cutting edge of the industry, the rest of the pitch proved to be a mirage. While the CEO’s vision is sound, the detriment to the company’s progression is the surrounding leadership. I anticipated that a growing company sought candidates that they saw as potentially growing with the company. Leaders molding others to join their ranks as the company expands.
I had one week of training, which consisted of a basic rundown of the equipment and how the systems worked, beyond that, the training was minimal. The feedback I did receive came from peers. Less of a “lending a helping hand” sort of way and more of a self-serving way. Leadership actually has agents seeking mistakes made by other agents and sending an email to that agent’s supervisor AND manager. Once a month you are presented with printed screenshots of your mistakes and asked to sign-off on them. This goes in your file. Once, a peer found a mistake I had made months earlier that I was confronted by management about. I explained I had only been on the job for 3 days when the mistake happened. I was still asked to sign it and it went in my file. Rather than cultivate an environment for people to grow and creating a team atmosphere, this turns everyone against each other. Agents are encouraged to undermine other agents.
I have worked other call centers. None have been anywhere close to as busy as this one. You will spend 100% of your day talking to customers and then get questioned by management as to why other tasks were neglected, like responding to customer emails or listening to your quality assurance recordings. If you so much as log out of the queue for 30 seconds to tend to one of these tasks you get a phone call from management questioning what you’re doing. If you say you were pulling a customer email to respond to, you are told there are customers waiting in the phone queue and forced to log in. When they confront you about emails not being done, responding with “I was on the phone” will label you incapable and an excuse-maker. Why would management put precedence on the inbound calls? It’s the only stat they have to answer to. Anything else doesn’t get done and they blame you. Micromanagement at its finest, with a sole purpose of covering their own tails.
The busy atmosphere is incredibly stressful. This runs through all of the agents and up through management. Rather than bring in adequate help, they are convinced the problem is merely the employees not following procedures or working fast enough. At no point will you ever be “caught up” in this job, and no matter how hard you try, management will find something you missed. You can’t go 100mph and expect perfection. And at CSG, there’s no tolerance for being human.
Rather than increase staffing, the company’s answer is mandatory overtime. I had permanent mandatory OT the entire time I was there. Then, they send out a survey asking how happy you are with things like work/life balance.
Think you have a better way of doing things? A way to enhance customer service or streamline a process? You better keep that to yourself, too. Any attempt at this is viewed as challenging management’s authority.
And those positive Glass Door reviews? Many are coming from current employees, encouraged by management to write them from their desk at work. I was pressured repeatedly to do so. How truthful a review do you think that will get you?
As for the Best Places to Work in Oklahoma award? You guessed it, employees are heavily pressured as well. Many fear for their jobs. There is another review on here where the reviewer mentions the CEO saying in a town hall that if you weren’t one of the ones that voted for the company, you could get out. I was there for this, and found it as unprofessional and manipulative as the original reviewer.
