Unrealistic Expectations
Pros
1) The pay can be decent if you jump through hoops for it. 2) You get to travel if you want to (but you will be working the entire time, so you do not get to enjoy much of it). 3) The company has a 401(k) with 8% Match. 4) HSA 5) Benefits Package (but it is not the greatest). 6) You can take your van home with you (but you have to pay $15/week for the "privileges"!)
Cons
The company has unrealistic expectations they expect their technicians to just crank out. The company still wants quality service, but stresses quantity. There are 4 levels to their pay system for their technicians: 1st) Trainee, 2nd) Autoglass Technician, 3) Senior Autoglass Technician, and 4) Master Autoglass Technician. The system does not care about seniority. You could make Master after your 1st year if you meet their odd criteria, but you can easily go back down the following year. Basically, you can go up and down like a rollercoaster from year to year along with your pay scale which jumps easily like $3/hr. for each pay level. The criteria that you need to reach for Master Autoglass Technician is basically having to do 24 or more glass units a week or more than 85% OPTI Fit (basically the amount of time it takes you to do a job. The faster you do a job, the better your score). The second scoring system is the Customer Survey System. To reach Master Tech level, you need to have more than 92% good customer surveys (this isn't too hard, but when the company doesn't support you or help you, this is an extremely hard obstacle to get past). If a customer gives you a score less than an 8 because say it was raining one day and they had to reschedule and you just happen to be the tech that installs on the rescheduled day, you already failed that survey. It doesn't matter if the customer is complaining about something that has nothing to do with the service you provided either, if they're unhappy, the company saves money by not having to pay you! Also, everything is against you, the insurance companies, the call center, the dispatch center... Everything makes the customer unhappy, it is up to you to make them feel special and happy in the 5 minutes allotted to you for "customer interaction" (4 minutes if you're an in-shop tech). The company tells customers that we will clean all their windows and vacuum out their car and makes all these sweet promises to the customers, but know that you can't actually do that when you have 7 installations and 4 recalibrations with say maybe 30 minutes of driving between each job location. The third criteria is Quality (or warranties). Basically you get dinged on any damage you may have caused to the vehicle (this is also understandable). To reach the Master Tech level, this criteria asks for less than 0.50% total of all your jobs. If you know what your doing, this isn't too bad. However!!! You also need to realize, customers want stuff for free! So they will call in many times about stupid things like we stole their bumper off their car, or something else outrageous. Typically, those never stick as long as you got a decent management team. Technicians will go out to inspect the "warranty claim" and determine if it is a legitimate claim or not. As long as that technician knows what they are looking for (looking at you trainee techs!). Typical day may consist of 6 or 7 installs, 1 warranty job, and 3 driving recalibrations. The warranty job does not count towards your glass units and often times is a complete re-do of the entire job (install and recalibration) which can be roughly about one and a half hours total. Keep in mind, customers make this job really hard by not being on time to their own appointments, scheduling jobs for the wrong vehicle (this happens a lot), expecting us to climb up and down 6 flights of stairs in a parking garage because our vehicle will not fit in it, and the list goes on and on. *You have to pay $15/week to be able to take your van home with you.
