To start with, the pay is horrendous for the work you are expected to do. No matter what department or calls you start off taking, you will make $9/hr. I say this because I see their ads all the time claiming that you will make $15,$20, or $25 an hour. I suppose a person could get to this point, but only through extremely high pressure sales situations. Basically, the tech is only allowed to help with certain issues for each ISP they support, after that point they are required (they screen calls to make sure you do) to pitch teleNetwork's "advanced tech support". This most often requires a very lengthy commitment on the customer's part, and is often used by low level techs to avoid calls they do not want to deal with.
The training you will receive takes a couple of days to complete, normally 4-5, 5 hour days. It will consist mainly of you making sure you understand their company policy, will touch on the tools used in their completely outdated systems, and will have you shadow a trainer as he takes a few calls. After that you are tossed into the que, and will begin taking calls. You have not known pressure until you are on your 3rd call ever speaking with someone who is upset, and have no idea how to handle the call. You are allowed to put them on hold for 2-3 minutes (this affects your metrics though, and you will be "coached" if you do it too often) in an attempt to reach out to a team leader or your departments level II, but more often than not you will not even get a reply in that amount of time. They will tell you to fill this time with "personal connection" talk (also a metric they judge and coach on). The problem with this is, if you have ever been upset and called an ISP for support, how many people want to talk about the weather or really anything in the world except why their internet is not working? It often leads to making customers more upset.
Call times at level 1 are expected to be in the ball park of 6 minutes or less. If you are much over this you will be coached, and will lose ability to move up or receive any kind of incentive increase until they are met. I've worked in IT for quite some time now, and to resolve any issue after going through the 2 or 3 minutes of REQUIRED qualifying questions is next to impossible. This is where many people hit a wall and either end up quitting or being fired because their call times are too high.
If you do by some chance manage to keep your call times down, make sure you read all required sentences, and force enough sales on people you will be often be offered a "promotion". I phrase it that way because ever time I was "promoted" it always came with a disclaimer that this is simply a lateral move and didn't qualify me for any type of pay increase, only an increase in responsibility.
After one of these lateral moves I found myself on the Onesupport team, this is when things began to be too much. Now along with taking back to back calls for my entire shift, I was responsible for helping people at Lvl 1 and 2 resolve their issues with software, customers, or their personal pc's not working. These came over in the form of a session through a remote support software, your calls did not stop as this was going on, and you could easily find yourself on a call with up to 10 or more sessions of people asking you to fix something. Towards the end of my time there this was exasperated by them adding a way for Onesupport retail customers to start a session with you as well. So on a call, taking sessions for internal issues, and taking sessions from external customer issues. Looking back i'm not sure how I juggled everything that was going on, and kept it straight in my mind.
Just before I quit they finally added a period of paid time at the start of your shift to get all of the software and web pages you would need for work going, I attribute this to the ongoing class action suit against them for not paying workers for startup and shutdown time. But even when they added this "feature" we were still informed that the time used there would be counted against our dnd time for the day. More simply put, the more time you spend here, the more time you will need to sit in your chair and take calls later to make up for it, or again you will be coached, put on probation, or demoted.
Break and lunch scheduling is a nightmare. The have a system where when you want a break or lunch, you must put yourself in a que and when an available spot comes open, if you aren't on a call you will be placed on break. The issue with this, is in times of larger call volume they will whittle it down to maybe 1 or 2 spots for a group of sometimes 60+ people. I had days that I could go 7 or 8 hours without being able to take a break simply because there were limited spots, or other employees would break company policy to make sure they were next by turning off their phone when a spot was about to open to make sure they weren't on a call. This was one of the most maddening things about working for them.
In conclusion, overwhelming work load, angry customers, poor compensation, impossible metrics, slim to no chance of moving up, high pressure sales, and a break system that pits you against your colleagues. If you have ANY other option for work, consider it before doing this. I often hear people complain about working retail, I've done both of them, and I would work retail the rest of my life if this was my only other option.
