Terminal Decline - Senior Client Success Associate Challenger Employee Review

BLUF: This was once a great place to work. Challenger’s best days are long behind it. C-Suite has always been in over their head with trying (and failing) to turn a consulting company into a tech company. Leadership across various departments used to be invested in developing their teams and creating a great culture. There were alot of smart people who were interested in truly learning the client’s world and implementing meaningful change via a great IP. Unfortunately, none of this applies now, other than the C-Suite still being inept. Prior leadership was gutted, institutional knowledge was jettisoned, the people I enjoyed working with mostly left/quit/were fired, all company culture was abandoned in pursuit of a grind culture so brutish and miserable it would put Elon Musk to shame, and everyone’s main mission is to collect as many paychecks as they can before the PE firm that owns Challenger finally dumps or sells the company as it continues to take water in it's 5th year without a buyer. Avoid at all costs. If Challenger were it’s own client, alarm bells would be ringing. Challenger is ultimately a directionless startup, underserviced by out of touch executives that fundamentally have zero understanding of the product/IP. In typical startup fashion, there's zero support or knowledge management. You are your own product expert, data analyst, salesperson, etc. Need someone from product to hop on a call and explain to an irate client why the elearning isn't working or why accounts are provisioned incorrectly? That's not within their scope of responsibility, it's yours. Good luck spending 3 weeks emailing back and forth with a support department that refuses to interface directly with the client. Do you know what a SCORM file is in how it integrates into 5 or 6 of the industry’s largest LMS platforms? No? You can look forward to learning it because the team who’s actually in charge of doing that for you is AWOL - that’ll now be your job. Need someone to write up a case study for a success you had? The guy in Marketing who was hired to write those left a year ago, good luck doing it yourself. Need a powerpoint deck for a kickoff call? Everyone has their own Frankenstein deck since the provided one was produced by someone who wouldn’t know a kickoff call if it knocked on their front door. Which form do we submit to issue completion badges again? I had 4 different forms bookmarked to do the same thing - each one was somebody’s pet project until they quit and the process had to be rebuilt but nobody ever consolidated what was still being supported. This lack of timely support has, and will continue to, plague partnerships. You’ll be spending more of your time learning to do someone else's job for them, while their department pursues vague developmental roadmaps that don't align with anyone else in the business. Big company bureaucracy, small company results. All work at Challenger is incredibly siloed, it’s the Wild West. There are few SOPs or best practices, documentation is few and far in-between (and often outdated), and there’s a plethora of vaguely defined, ill informed “flavor of the month” initiatives that quickly fade. Turnover is intense, frequent and often abrupt. Layoffs, quiet layoffs, firings, quitting with no notice. KPIs, roles/responsibilities and commission structure changes often. Even the company rebrand failed since they fired the person in charge of it. Some products continue to use the old logo and colors which confuses clients. There are constant departures from all levels of the org leaving a massive cultural hole and lack of institutional knowledge or knowledge management. There’s zero meaningful or formal professional development. Nobody can tell you what you must do to be promoted, because there’s just no plans to develop internal talent. Huge preference for outside hires. Few opportunities to seek out other opportunities within the organization. Working in CS (North America team) - CS NA is routinely known within Challenger as the most miserable, depressing and discontent part of the company. CS leadership is unqualified, blatantly hostile, toxic and abusive. Multiple individuals have been confronted in a demeaning and grossly unprofessional manner from CS leadership which resulted in all but one Senior Associate quitting the organization within 3 months. Yes - an entire job type quit the organization, leaving CS managers without anyone to manage. You will get very used to being reminded “you’re an at-will employee”, yet leadership is still surprised each time someone quits. It’s truly a miserable culture that brings out the worst in it’s leadership. Leadership is openly hostile, backhanded, talks to employees of all levels and lobs direct accusations via Teams. They even threatened to remove the Q and A from the company town hall because someone “dared” to ask about pay transparency. Department culture surveys are routinely dismal to the point of being comedic, with HR only stepping in recently in an effort to “try” to triage the situation after the entire junior staff fled. “Try” is in quotes as it’s too late. Any meaningful change would require the firing of ALL CS leadership and hiring new leaders interested in building a culture and forming a relationship with their team. HR claims they want “verifiable and actionable feedback from current employees” rather than the torrent of (justifiably) negative anonymous reviews from Glassdoor. Once verifiable and actionable feedback regarding the pervasive climate of fear or workplace hostility is raised with HR, you will be ignored. People often claim that HR is not your friend and in Challenger's case, HR is part of the problem. Leadership, both in CS and company-wide, above the Director level is disinterested in building a culture that empowers or inspires, is disinterested in furthering our main value proposition and is disinterested in making this a place people actually want to work at. Given the absolute scale of voluntary departures in 2023, let alone layoffs, it’s evident Challenger is not an appealing place to work and it is fundamentally unable to hire + retain talent. The CS team in Europe is competent, has very few departures and is generally successful in their ventures. The reason the EU team performs so well is because they’ve retained institutional knowledge, developed their talent and most importantly, are insulated from unpleasant leadership in NA. Offerings/Direction - Challenger's leadership has a fundamentally different view of it's offerings than their client base. Challenger's main offering is in-person and virtual workshops that are meant to upskill sales/marketing departments. The CS function is supposed to work to integrate said change into client organizations. Unfortunately, Challenger leadership is interested in doing everything other than supporting the mission above. They're consumed with Gong (where leadership will watch and critique all your calls) and Salesforce plugins, two in-house podcasts that can rarely find a guest who isn't also a Challenger employee (have fun being forced to plug these on client calls and agendas), a win/loss tool that they genuinely had to give away due to minimal interest from the market, and hosting big social events for execs only. Need workshops, vital elearning or feedback surveys translated into German, Mandarin or Japanese to support large multinational clients in global rollouts? Challenger refuses to translate their main offerings, but they'll try to sell a win/loss app that nobody asked for. Needless to say, it's painful to watch the good folks in sales have to explain to clients why they should be spending even more money than last year for offerings that have no true value proposition within their organization. It's demoralizing to continually tell clients that we don't have what they want, yet also be forced to push products they're uninterested in. As Challenger is a complicated sales methodology, CS should be expected to be experts on it so they can advise and provide best practices. The only true Challenger experts who can carry a substantive conversation about methodology, implementation and best practices are on the Sales team. CS on it’s own is unable to act as a consultative voice as Challenger hires project managers, not consultants. Current plans to transform CS into a consultative department are half baked, ill defined and in typical Challenger fashion, will soon fall by the wayside in favor of another project. CS leadership's priority is any low hanging fruit that has no overall impact and generally makes people more miserable. Ie: in lieu of any actual support, they'd rather mandate the use Challenger-branded Zoom background or new email signatures. You better be on camera 24/7 or leadership will browbeat management to bother you about it. Those are the priorities the team cares about, and none will make your day to day work any easier or more pleasant. Compensation - Pay actually isn’t bad for an entry level employee in the DMV area. Insurance is also good. However, you’ll be working well over 40hrs a week in an environment that is demotivating, miserable, and draining. It’s truly not worth the money or the resume experience. I cannot stress this enough, APPLY ELSEWHERE. Work two or three jobs to make ends meet rather than one with Challenger, you'll thank yourself in the long run. Looking back, my final year at Challenger was my worst experience in any job I've ever had. It's truly a detriment to your health, both physical and mental.