I and every member of my team experienced similar concerns and raised them to our direct manager(s) and HR countless times over the span of 1.5 years. My entire team (7 people, not counting those who left the Support team) all eventually quit because there was no end in sight.
1. The workload became insurmountable for post-sales customer-facing teams (Customer Support, Customer Success, and Implementation).
- I regularly worked 12-14 hour days (not counting weekends and with no overtime pay) and was still drowning.
- As team members left, critical roles were not back-filled which resulted in an ever-growing amount of work as new accounts continued to flood in. I understand needing to wait a month or two to back-fill a position, but ignoring our needs for over a year just doesn't make sense. As Elation grows, so should the customer-facing teams.
2. Rather than hire more people to back-fill lost team members and help with the workload, we were asked to speed up implementations and push new users through without being properly trained on the product. My manager needed better numbers to show upper mgmt.
- This undoubtedly put more strain on our Support team (who were also grossly understaffed and have their own numbers to hit), but this didn't seem to matter. **Customers should never be neglected so that a team can hit their numbers.** This creates a vicious cycle which results in unhappy users and higher churn.
- I can handle a large workload, I can handle long hours, I can handle less pay (I've worked at other start-ups and understand "the start-up life"), but I'm not okay with fudging numbers at someone else's expense (whether it be my customers or the Support team) to make me or my manager look better.
- This was incredibly disheartening and was ultimately the final straw for me.
3. Pay is minimal and raises are practically non-existent. Negotiate hard up front and be persistent/super noisy when it comes to raises, otherwise you will not get one.
4. Professional development is non-existent for the post-sales customer-facing teams.
- We didn't have any sort of official review process to receive constructive criticism about how we're performing.
- There are no programs or workshops for customer-facing teams to further our learning and improve skills.
- My team had two off-sites in the 3 years I worked there; however, no positive changes came from either due to ever-changing management and understaffed teams.
