Willful OSHA violations - we were told in writing we should never use "personal," time to use the restroom and that's what our breaks were for, violating OSHA 1910.141(c)(1)(i)
Scrutiny for try to take care of the customer - if it was necessary to call a customer back for any reason, and the callback lasted more than 10 minutes you may have people coming to ask why you are not "available," or getting emails the next day asking you to explain why your total "outbound," time for the day exceeded their goal.
The company stopped putting any faith into troubleshooting abilities of their agents and mandated use of a line-of-questioning as the only way we were allowed to help customers. Essentially you become an interactive script and even if you can see in your notes or diagnostics what the customer's issue is, you are not allowed to simply take the proper step to fix it, you must ask the customer irrelevant questions and fill out the ticket. You are no longer able to even send a simple refresh signal to a piece of equipment without "permission," from their line-of-questions system. This system was full of bugs and feedback and bug-reporting were ignored for months at a time, only then to receive a stock reply of "we are working on it," or the ticket being rejected as a "duplicate," but with no resolution. Despite the amount of time you were forced to waste in this system, the metric of how long you can have a customer on the phone for was never adjusted to compensate.
The system essentially nullified any need for training as anything you learned in training was no longer useful - you could only say and do what was on your screen. You essentially become an automated system with slightly better voice recognition. I truly believe the overall goal of this is to reduce training costs. Before this system, new agents spent six weeks in training. Comcast call centers have a huge turnover rate, so the cost of training is fairly significant. Eliminating the need for training, even at the cost of a far, far, inferior customer experience seems to be preferable. This will make employees more expendable and help with costs related to the turnover rate. No competent person stays at Comcast long because the pay is not worth the environment and the way you are treated. I think it's very sad Comcast thinks this is a better solution than fixing the things that make people quit and hiring competent people who can troubleshoot effectively without literally being told what to do, step-by-step, real-time.
While paid time off seemed generous, the fact that an unscheduled absence for *any reason,* was considered "unacceptable," offset that significantly. T-Boned on your lunchbreak? Unacceptable; point. Death of a close family member who does not meet their strict criteria of "immediate?" Unacceptable; point for any time missed as a result. They give you what they call "flex-waives," which, in reality, are what other companies call "personal days." The difference is they are used as excuses to not waive any absence for any reason beyond those 4 "flex-waives, regardless of what documentation and you may have and regardless of the situation.
It is normal to take the unfavored shift when starting with an employer, but at Comcast, I was stuck with it. 1-Midnight, including weekends. Despite the fact that their was a shift bid 5 months after we started, we were not allowed to participate. My numbers were good and I looked forward to getting a more manageable shift. They were using 3 months of scorecard data to calculate rank. While we had 3 months of data, the range they defined included one month for which we were not on the phone. It would have been very easy to slide that date range to let us participate in the bid. There were a number of ways to let us participate, but they chose not too. Seniority is only 30% of the bid, it is supposed to be based on performance but despite being a top-performer I was stuck for a year working 1pm-Midnight because it was easier for them logistically.
Benefits were quite expensive compared to other Fortune 500s and for slightly worse coverage.
Many promised benefits were not possible to take advantage of. They supposedly have a system where Comcast will pay for certain IT courses and you pay for the testing to get a certificate. This was a key point for me in my interview, and it was glorified during training when they indoctrinate about how amazing Comcast is. For 3 months I tried to coordinate taking advantage of this program, I involved multiple supervisors, a manager, and they worked with HR. Supervisor and manager had never heard of it, I sent screenshots of the company intranet discussing exactly how to take advantage of it, they worked with HR, and nothing ever happened. I was emailing often to check on progress and simply getting the run-around, it was completely impossible to use.
