Pros
-If you get a good Team Lead, the job becomes so much easier. My Team Lead was almost always available for questions. Eventually I had to utilize a second Team Lead while the first was on vacation, and she was also lovely and available. -Compensation is good as a starting wage, good benefits. -The training program is incredible, well-formed, obviously very thought-through and does a good job of preparing MA's for "going live" in the Call Center. -The coworkers I have on my team are lovely and were a great help as well. -VTO (Voluntary Time Off) is widely available in the winter and early spring, allowing you to leave early if it's not busy. You often can get approved for it, but they will also usually want you to put in hours on Saturday for "make up", since they are chronically underscheduled on Saturdays due to the part where their workers like that weekends exist and would like to ever have one. VTO disappears during the summer due to the uptick in calls, which is understandable.
Cons
-Which Team Lead does your shop will often change your score wildly, even if the actual call is the same. Different TL's take off for different things, and now your own TL doesn't always shop you. My coworkers often lost points for things like "you audibly coughed here" or "there was a three-second pause before you answered" - things that we honestly occasionally cannot help. -Compensation is good as a STARTING wage. There is no raise program unless you go through the Career Path, which requires you to attend classes, unpaid, and write book reports, also unpaid. The company maintains you make this back through the raise system as you move through the Career Path, so they don't NEED to pay you for the classes they require you to take. There is no annual raise. -Support falls off wildly after training is over. You are supposed to call Agent Help if you have questions, but MA's routinely are told, when calling Agent Help, to go ask theri Team Lead... and then the Team Lead will simply tell them to call Agent Help. I have coworkers with bad Team Leads who would get trapped in this cycle and never get an answer to their questions at all, eventually giving up out of sheer frustration. -The attendance system is a joke. You get 7 infractions, and one drops off every thirty days that you INCUR NO FURTHER INFRACTIONS. If your daycare closes and it takes you two days to find someone to watch your child, that's two infractions right there and God forbid anyone gets sick in the next month. It puts MA's in a position of coming in to work even when they are so ill they cannot do their actual jobs, which they then get lectured for not doing effectively and told "call in sick, this is why we give you infractions". -The scheduling system. The only availability the scheduling system cares recognizes is if you want to work Sat or Sun for your required weekend. If you have classes on Friday and can't work after 1 PM? Too bad, system doesn't care. You have to trade shifts with other coworkers. I had two coworkers who were in the National Guard who were ALWAYS scheduled on their weekend they had to go out for NR duties, and who were told that it was their responsibility to switch shifts or give away hours. I'm pretty sure it's illegal to schedule active members of the military for days they have military duties or give them infractions for missing. Oh, your schedule means that you need to work until midnight? Well, that's nice at first, but the longer you stay the earlier your hours get, period. There is no incentive to stay because you'll end up switching every. single. day. to get the hours that actually work for you. The problem, of course, is that the system does robo-scheduling - a computer makes your schedule. You will read e-mail after e-mail of people BEGGING to switch shifts because they were scheduled on their wedding day, the day they let the scheduling system know about, because the system is a computer and doesn't care if you're getting married - or their child is sick and they can't afford to call out to take care of them - or they've been trying to plan to leave town for a month and were simply told they "might" get it if the schedule likes them that week. -The computer programs that make our job possible routinely go down or "glitch out" - we are required to continue working during this time, even if we are completely undercut by the programs going out. This isn't the company's fault, but the fault of the programs... it's still a con of working there, but I can't blame the company for it. -Adherence is hilarious. In theory it makes perfect sense - it should be easy to spend 96% of the time you're scheduled to take calls at your desk, right? Well... no. Your TL's coaching time will almost always run over. You may not be the kind of person who can hold it for the two-to-three hours you're scheduled before getting a bathroom break. They may pull you aside to talk to you, tell Control Desk not to log you off, and you come back to discover they logged you out five minutes ago because there are four Control Desk people working and only one knew you were talking to a Team Lead. There are a surprising amount of pregnant women at Level One, who are continually lectured about their low adherence levels because... turns out... being pregnant doesn't really lend itself to only going to the bathroom once every three hours or not being sick. -Suggestions made by MA's are essentially ALWAYS dismissed, written off, or talked-down about. Despite the fact that the MA's take the calls and therefore have the actual call experiences to back them up, they are simply shrugged at. -Team Leads routinely gossip about the people on their Teams, where the employee's coworkers can hear. This hurts morale in a big way, because it simply sets up a "If they talk about John Doe this way after his shop, what do they say about me?"
