Treated like a Time a Dozen - Customer Service Representative Cengage Employee Review

1.0
May 8, 2015
Recommend
CEO approval
Business Outlook

Pros

Time off is good.

Cons

Awful place to work. Good Training is pretty much non existent. In the Call Center there are different Departments for K-12 Schools, Higher Ed, and Cengage Brain, but you are only trained in your department yet if you get another departments call, you have to own that call,even though you do not have access to the same data bases that group has. They call it 'White Glove" service which is crap, because how is that great customer service to take a call for a department you know nothing about. The worst part of the job is that you live in fear everyday of transferring a call to the wrong department by mistake and that department tells on you, they fire you. If you do not believe me ask anyone who works in the Kentucky call center and this will be confirmed. We are very under paid, and you do the job of many departments. Raises are horrible. I have received a $.25 cent raise and I have been here for over two years, and I got the maximum raise because my number s were great. Upper Management is a joke, They are mean and very condescending. You should read some of the emails they send to us. They are almost threatening. This company could care less about their employees.

Explore other reviews about Cengage

5.0
Mar 28, 2026
Recommend
CEO approval
Business Outlook

Pros

Total rewards, time off, great people and culture

Cons

Lots of changes and uncertainty at times

1.0
Jul 13, 2026
Anonymous employee
Recommend
CEO approval
Business Outlook

Pros

The individuals below the management level are good people, with some good people at management but C-Suite is horrible.

Cons

C-Suite hides their plans under corporate speak. Cengage was a family owned private company and they sold and ever since then has had, debt, schemes to shuffle and restructure debt while implementing RIFs after RIFs after RIFs...never ending and amazingly has been in increased this last year. From their actions it's outsource as much as you can of company operations and squeeze value from Intellectual Property. Look how many times they've renamed themselves. They had a CTO join for about a month or two until she realized it was a role with no team, no authority and left. The CEO is amazing at spin, you hear "great, great, great" corporate speak as the reality on the ground is "this failed, that failed..what!? they're gone!...what they moved that department offshore!...what!? that department is now a vendor relationship...oh we're not DEI focused because the wind changed". The trend is contraction not expansion, no ground breaking innovation. My jaded view from college on expensive books has only grew since I see how the sausage is made.

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