- Practically impossible to get promoted unless you are friends' with management.
- Very repetitive job
- Most of the time there is not a balance between being on ready (on the phone) and picklist (emails) which means that a lot of agents will be the majority of the time on the phone, and some others (specially smaller language lines such as Turkish or Danish) all the time on emails. Still, all the language lines have the same KPIs and same salary even though the amount of workload is not the same at all.
- A lot of owners that register their properties with us do not get proper training. This is because there are more accounts getting opened than people who provide training (aka coordinators). What matters here is to reach the 2M properties, quantity over quality... Then most of the calls you will receive are because the partners (property owners) are clueless due to lack of training or just because they are not computer literate as there is not any type of filter or criteria to join Booking.com
- Some agents do not have a good level on their second language which results in customers' frustration. We have had customers calling us because the message they received from Booking.com had a lot of grammar mistakes and misspellings.
- There are a lot of changes going on and they do not tend to be communicated properly which causes lots of confusion and misunderstandings.
- They expect you to have a 80% partner or customer satisfaction (PSAT or CSAT) even though people who call you tend to rate the company and/or the outcome rather than the service you provide. This has been raised with Team Leaders but not much has changed.
- Micromanagement. Your TL will push you to get to a certain target (sometimes even expect you to do more) because they will have their CSM (Customer Service Manager) pestering them, and so on and so forth. Very target based, not focusing on people's skills but their stats and figures.
- It feels like you are in High School again. Very controlling environment. Every call is recorded and if you are in the wrong code, you will get a call from a RTC (Real Time Coordinator) to "kindly" remind you that you are not in the right code. Similarly, if one week you don't meet one of the targets you get a slap on the wrist from your TL without even allowing yourself to give an explanation.
- Your experience in Booking.com totally depends on your TL. It could be a bliss or an absolute nightmare depending if s/he likes you or not.
- If you don't mingle with your team enough or go to the team outings (or any social event) you are seen as an outcast and are frowned upon.
- Bad communication between departments. At Customer and Accommodation Service we deal with different topics such as invoicing, reviews, content, registrations... and getting in touch with the right department can be an odyssey. When you forward messages to some of them, it may take them several days or even weeks to get any type of response.
- Some of the TLs are clueless and unaware what customer service agents deal with everyday. However, they are very unempathethic and push people over the limit.
- If you are sick/late 3 times over a period of a year, you are required to attend a formal meeting and could be a reason for dismissal. You will still have this meeting even if you have talked to your TL about it and the reasons are justified properly.
- Computers are very slow and can take you up to 10 mins to log in into one for the first time, and this will happen often as there is a hot desk policy in place.
