The month long training prepares you for a fraction of the most common issues that your clients will call/email with. PCTY knows that, which is why they still consider Account Manager I to be a training position... you're just training with real clients (the lowest tier of clients who pay the least amount of money for support) so leadership doesn't really care when resolutions aren't happening and the mistakes are big enough to drive the client to another payroll company. There is a really great internal help line to reach out to if you're stumped or need assistance in the knowledge base, but they keep track of how many times you call and it negatively impacts your stats for a promotion... even though you're reaching out to resolve a client issue. So you stop calling the help line as much and you start offering fewer real solutions to the client and you start hating your job a little more because you're less effective than you want to be... but you might still get a promotion so at least there is that. The amount of work is staggering. You hang up from one call and while you’re recording your notes in Sales Force your phone rings with the next client issue. Nonstop. All day. Don’t get me wrong, I would much rather be busy than sitting around doing nothing, but this is next level. You just don't have enough time to do a good job and actually resolve an issue for a client while staying within the required parameters management has set for you. This is why there are so many upset customers. This situation happened to me all the time - the previous AM put a bandaid on the client's issue (or didn't understand the problem the start with) and told the client it was fixed when it wasn't. Then their phone rang again and they went off to "help" the next client. I would get the client when they called back, now even more upset then they were before because they felt that their time was wasted and they were given the run around. They would threaten to leave or yell at me and call me stupid because of how frustrated they were. Work/life balance isn't too bad for hourly employees because at the end of the day at least you have the ability to clock out. Management really harps on you taking your two breaks and your one hour lunch as decompression time away from the phones and email - But you're so stressed with having a high number of open cases that you work through the breaks and you stay an hour after you’re scheduled out just to try to catch up so you don’t start the next day feeling so far behind. You had plans that required you to leave on time? Well, too bad, more often than not you can find yourself stuck on a phone call because you have to stay available until the end of your shift which means someone could call you with one minute to spare and you might be on the phone with them for who knows how long. There is a possible solution for this – schedule your case time (dedicated block of time to work on open cases) for the end of your shift. This only works if you actually get to use your case time (sometimes it’s taken away because there isn’t enough availability on the phones) and the rest of your team doesn’t have the same plan because someone has to be on available. To this day, I believe only 2 people from my training class of 30 are still at PCTY.
