Pros
401k and tuition assistance were good
Cons
There are so many it is hard to list them all. The training provided is subpar, at best, and does not prepare you for what you will face on a daily basis. Once you get through that (over the course of a couple months), you are told it will be a "slow buildup" of claims, which is untrue. You wind up with an unmanageable amount of claims almost immediately. You are expected to keep up with emails, phone calls, and faxes, placing documents and notes into a system that we were told was from 2004 and functions terribly. How can you expect employees to handle that? I worked with multiple employees who, while they were good people, could not handle their work load. I don't mean to sound arrogant, but I was almost always caught up with my work, because that's just how I operate. Some of my co-workers, however, were two and three weeks behind. One person that I worked with literally had 50 voicemails to return after being out for several days. So, naturally, once I finished all my work, I was expected to do theirs for them. They just call that "assistance," but it went well beyond that. You can imagine the issues this creates if someone needs to take time off for illness, vacation, etc. That work just falls on others on your team, and builds and builds and builds to no end. One of the worst parts of the job was ACD calls, where someone normally assigned to another case manager calls in, and you are expected to help them with their case, even having no familiarity with it. I heard countless times, "Yeah, my regular case manager's voicemail says she's going to be out of the office for an undetermined length of time, and I don't know what is going on with my case." Invariably, the case would be all screwed up, with missing documents etc., and you would be responsible for dealing with an angry caller, upset about circumstances over which you had no control. I was told numerous times by various callers that they would be getting lawyers to fight the decisions, and several people cursed at me. Micromanagement was through the roof as well. A system called Workspace is used as the call system. It can track when you are in "Ready" status vs "Not Ready" (e.g. on break, in meeting, etc.). When you are listed as "Not Ready," the ACD calls mentioned above cannot come in. However, you are only authorized two 15 minute breaks and a 30 minute lunch over an eight hour day, plus time for several meetings throughout the week, so if you go much over that then management will notice. Even when you are listed as "Not Ready" and on breaks, your own claimants can still call and leave voicemails, send emails, send faxes, etc. I cannot count the number of times I shoveled down my lunch on my 30 minute break to come back to 5 or 6 voicemails in just that time. It was absolutely infuriating and awful. In terms of management, that is yet another joke. As I said before, my performance was the best on my team. I was told, point blank, in a monthly meeting that I was doubling the office average in calls made and accepted. For that, I was given a performance review of mostly 3/5 scores (meaning average performance), and a raise offer of just barely over 1% after 9 months on the job, not even enough to keep up with inflation. If that was the case for me, then what were the reviews for my co-workers who were so far behind? All the while, we were told consistently that, "It'll get better." Over and over again. And you know what? It never did. I could not be happier about having left that position, and am so much happier in my current job. Better pay, more time off, and much, much, much less stress. Advancement opportunities were also horrendous. I worked with people who had been doing the same job, on the phones all day, for 2 or 3 years with no promotion to do anything else or anything. Really, there is nowhere to be promoted to from that position. You can get up to a manager level or trainer (after a decade, literally), but even then you will be doing the same work, just with a different title and more stress because you have 10 people under you to watch. In closing, I will just say this: DO. NOT. DO. IT. If you want to torcher yourself and are absolutely desperate, go ahead, but don't say you weren't warned.