Pros
Direct management is usually excellent. They are employees who excel at entry-level so they know the job. Charity giving and community volunteering organised through the company is excellent. I worked in the contact centre so I loved the flexibility of the hours. Their seniority system is very fair and includes employees that left for a bunch of years to return.
Cons
1. Nepotism. It's who you had as a manager (or who you know in the company) that affects your career trajectory. I watched awesome and high-value employees (not me as I never wanted to be promoted) flounder and fail after disillusionment. 2. Scam Coworkers. While not "illegal" many high performers tricked customers into upgrades or scammed the sale (sorry, "solution" in RBC speak) tracking system. There was no anonymous way to report it and direct managers (who needed the high sales on their records) would do NOTHING unless the scammers were discovered by a third party (usually when a higher-up pulled a random call and looked like an idiot when the High Performer is scamming the client). So many calls started with a client screaming at me over a fee caused by an upgrade they didn't know anything about. 3. PUSH THOSE SALES, SON. I had phenomenal customer service stats (the highest on my team) but I was always on some form of probation based on my sales. So even though customers loved talking to me, I struggled every day with inadequacy and fear of failure. I started the job years previously when it was customer service with a small side of sales. Then through the years I was with them, the focus sprung onto almost SALES OOPS DID I SAY SALES I MEANT SOLUTIONS entirely but also whether customers would recommend RBC (No doubt so that they could win some bank award. If you want to retaliate at a terrible employee mark low on the Likelihood to Recommend portion of the survey. That's the only customer service they give any care about.) 3. Transparency. I have never worked in a place so riddled with gossip because the management refused to share ANY information with employees. The building was sold and we found out through a public news site. None of us knew it was up for sale or that they were thinking of alternatives for the call centre location. Or whether we would keep our jobs or not. 4. Abuse. No thanks for dealing with a man who threatened you but get your buttcheeks on that phone because STATS. Your mental health is important, but not reeeeeaaally. If it wasn't sales it didn't matter. I refused to hang up on clients who were completely verbally abusive because I had this misguided assumption that RBC gave a darn about me and them and would appreciate the effort of retention. Screaming wheels get whatever they want and so by encouraging this behaviour RBC has made it even more toxic an environment for front line. I would count each day by the number of screaming monsters I dealt with. Six people swearing at me and calling me some form of stupid meant it was lunch time. Or sometimes first break. It was brutal. I felt so small. So insignificant. My company thought I was stupid. The customers thought I was stupid. I began to believe it. The amount of therapy I went through to get back to where I was just before working at RBC has been so expensive I should send them a bill. I even spent some time on call escalations (you know, when the jerks amongst clients ask for a manager) because my customer service scores were so high. It broke me. No company no matter how much their bottom line should allow that kind of verbal abuse to come from clients. And if you have ANY empathy do not apply for a job at RBC. You will end up on stress leave and a concoction of three different types of antidepressants. 5. Goats to Pasture. Want to know why nobody says the same thing? Why does the branch tell you one thing, the call-centre another? Cause the central help desk is run by close to retirement goats who are just riding out their last weeks munching on cud and expleting nonsense. They are supposed to be knowledgeable, but half the time the explanations they give are WRONG. I am a rules person and read the policies and procedures. I would call for assistance with help desk for weird questions, but at some point realised that I was talking to the people the bank cannot fire. So they don't care. There was one guy who worked back east in Montreal and Toronto that would just make stuff up. All of us knew his name and would hang up to call again. He was never fired from help desk. I just imagine all the branches who didn't have the awareness that the guy was terrible probably listened to him and gave bad information or screwed up accounts completely.