Pros
Next best alternative to wearing a straitjacket in a padded room while trying to beg for help by writing on the wall with a smuggled lipstick container between one's toes.
Cons
Where do I begin? 1. I thought the first three seasons I worked were bad enough, but this year tops it. Management is largely unprofessional, inexperienced, and makes some really stupid decisions. Some rocket scientist in upper management decided that we didn't need additional servers to handle this year's monumental increase in hapless customers who have no choice but to enroll through us because their group retirement medical plans are ending, and instead invested in an unnecessary and worthless management-to-employee feedback system that does nothing and could just as easily be handled by the existing email system. No one at the top cared to listen to the rank-and-file experienced employees who knew that the number of enrollees was going to exceed the capacity of the system, creating system slowdowns that have made the customers stuck in the queue up to an hour past their scheduled enrollment appointments wait even longer. A call that should take thirty minutes takes an hour because we have to wait for the computer system to process the input; I have waited as long as ten minutes just to get a customer's chosen plan loaded into the cart. Customers are having an already miserable experience compounded by the incompetence of poorly-trained first-year benefit advisors and customer service representatives. 2. The company has grown too large for its business model. The muckity-mucks at Towers Watson are apparently oblivious to the roiling crisis beneath them because of the seemingly endless stream of money flowing into the company's coffers. Despite this phenomenal cash flow, the company is going to collapse under its own weight. Many policies are being written on the very fringe of legality--customers are being slammed into plans by people with telemarketer mentalities, who do so because they are rewarded for quantity and not quality, and many customers are dissatisfied and/or do not understand the plans they have been enrolled into. 3. There is no incentive other than the constant fear of being laid off at the end of December, which will happen to at least 85% of the current workforce, who will then be rehired the following summer to prepare for the next season. Employees who sell a bazillion plans, regardless of lack of providing a positive customer experience, are retained for the off-season while those who are truly skilled and compassionate and have the customer's best interest at heart are chastised for taking too long on calls and not selling enough plans, even though these latter employees receive the highest ratings for positive customer service. 4. A large number of the supervisors and a few of the pod managers are clueless idiots and/or have a very skewed vision of what the people under them are supposed to be accomplishing.