Pros
- Caring Management: If you are sick, need time off, have an emergency, they will bend over backwards to help you. - Nonrestrictive Jobs: Like to work on other things as well as do your primary job? As long as it doesn't interfere with your ability to do your job, they are fine with it. - Love Hard Workers: Like to go above and beyond? This job is for you. They love, and reward people who go the extra mile. - Promotions Aplenty: Think of this like the Air Force, where promotions are hard earned, but once awarded, rarely go away. It takes some time, but you will be moved up to different levels, and eventually to team lead, supervisor, and possibly even management. - Easy Hours: You ARE an employee, so you must work a shift, but doing so is negotiable if you need an hour off here, or 30 minutes off there, need to leave early, whatever. As long as you show up for your shift, are not consistently late, and do your job, they are happy with you. - Client Support: Calls come in on the custom phone system, and you take them fairly easy enough. At the start of the company, calls were about 60+ calls per agent per day, and were down to about 5-6 by the time the layoffs were finished. Even on busy days, where calls were back to back, because training and knowledge was there, they rarely lasted over 10 minutes for CS, and 20 minutes for Technical Support. - Remote Access: Most are virtual employees, meaning they work from a home office, and not from a HQ setting. Technical Support uses WebEx SC to connect to a computer, which is a bit of a pain, and hard to manage, but didn't cost the company any more money, so was a bonus. - Paid for Waiting Time: As long as you are being constructive, creating knowledge, helping other issues, and doing other projects, you are paid for waiting for calls. - Cross Training, Helpful Departments: If one department is overloaded, other managers can help step in. For example, with a major outage with a primary tool, which prompts hundreds of calls to come into the support queue, Customer Service can pop into the Level 1 queue for technical support, and help field some of those calls. This helps keep departments focused, while still providing proper support.
Cons
- Communication Between Departments: Working in a department is a pyramid, with the Manager at top, branching to the 2 or 3 supervisors, followed by 3-4 Team Leads, who control the techs and reps under them. This structure lends itself to a microcosmic environment where those in the environment rarely speak to those outside of the environment, even with just cause. For example, Technical Support could transfer a call to Customer Service, but rarely do those departments talk to each other if there is an issue, instead the calls may bounce around. - Stability: At the start, the company was doing well, was in it's hay day, but then had some issues. Legal issues are resolved, thankfully, and the CEO decided to keep the doors open, which is good, but there were sweeping, and several rounds of lay offs. Most notably of the Call Center, which laid off about 75 people at one time; without e-mails, phone calls, or even a webinar, just a simple can't log in, and you receive a letter in the mail. Departments then began to downsize, cutting 20-30 staff at a time, several times, and then finally the last round of layoffs ended up merging several departments, cutting again staffing by 50%. - Benefits: While you are given 6 PTO days per calendar year, and can use them, even in advance (have to repay if you owe a debt, of course at termination), that's about where the benefits end. No health insurance, no 401k. - Outages: Even if you had nothing to do with the outage, you are ultimately responsible for the outage; which is understandable, as it does cut into your ability to be reliable. Some tool outages are common, which do come out of your check, if you are not working due to the outage. Reliability on 3rd party web services always gave job security, but made the job of Tech Support and Customer Service much harder with more frequent angry callers. - Non Job related responsibilities: Due to the layoffs, several departments were merged, such as the call center. Anyone who was in the phone system, basically took call center jobs, regardless of the primary job you do. Technical Support agents do not make the best salesmen, in fact, most make fairly crappy ones, but they ended up being forced to take these calls. - Pay: Not competitive on the Technical Side, most making less than $15/hour, and even senior reps making less than $17. Even the department supervisors rarely make anything higher than $17.