Pros
*Work from home. This the main reason to take this job. (Don't treat it as a job you can multitask with or expect decent breaks, so not the best for new parents.) *Good, helpful coworkers who will keep you sane and make the worst moments better. (Not to be confused with managers, who are hit or miss.) *When you can work late-shift and keep it, the job isn't back to back. There was a time I was actually starting like the job. *For several months, there was no mandatory overtime and plenty of opportunities to take off. *Sometimes you'll get a nice call from an elderly person and you can walk them through the whole system while they are very nice to you. (Technically this hurts your stats though.) *They are so understaffed that you can get away with being imperfect or going "off script" so as long you don't do something incredibly stupid like mismanage private information or act rude toward a customer. *Decent benefits.
Cons
*You actually work for Comcast (one of the worst companies in the country) and assist with their Xfinity Home security product which can be flaky garbage (meaning false alarms with charges from the local police or missing camera footage when customer desperately needs it - both happened many times), as your customers will tell you again and again in a very angry tone and maybe even blame you for it. Perhaps this can be pinned on the job itself or Comcast, but expect a great deal of emotional labor. Sometimes you'll want to say out of pity "Yeah, just cancel this crap - oh wait, you signed a contract, so I guess you are stuck". Comcast is simply evil and if you for a moment start to believe in the product, a call will come along to remind you it's mediocre at best and sold in a scummy way. *The Comcast phone system is a nightmare for their customers and often you will be where the customer ends up after long wait times, a bunch of pointless automation transfers, and misdirects. Sometimes these customers will not have Xfinity Home at all or will have been dealing with an emergency situation during all that time trying to reach us (they can't call the department directly). Why they can't just call XH directly I don't understand (and many, many people who call in will also ask this question). See above point. *12/hour at best for work that is probably worth more and is often more complex than Tier 1 Help Desk implies. *Because of really dumb policies, you are often stuck between sacrificing your stats and assist with things you are not technically not suppose to do VS not actually helping the customer and pushing their problems down the line or onto a 30 minute wait time to another department. I usually choose the former and still had decent enough stats. *Training did not prepare me AT ALL for the job. Going through powerpoints about Comcast policy and stuff, much of which is more about TV or Internet. Not to say it is useless information, but it's trivia at best compared to what the job is really about. Their strategy seems to be throw you into the deep-end with back to back calls. First few days was an absolute nightmare and you'll feel like they've gone crazy for letting the customers put up with you. *Tools can mess up pretty bad and seem to just get worse over time (they restrict access to basic features which were available a mere year ago). Depending on how they mess up, the answer can be something like "wing it". I've had some serious trouble here with tools taking minutes to load and transfers simply not working at all, and I think I had it lucky compared to some folks. This and the above point go back to the idea that will have to deal with a lot of anxiety. There are times where I became almost light-headed from stress and I'm not the kind of guy who ever really got that way with anything. Impossible, nightmarish situations that make you cringe just thinking about them even after you quit. *And here is why I quit, the final straw: Expect your shift to change on you, again and again. You want to work night shift? If that was your goal from the very start? Well, one day, they will force everyone to bid on new shifts and there will be NO night shifts at all, just evening to midnight and early morning to afternoon. These will may be 12 hour shifts instead of 8, even though the latter is what works for you. On top of this, I could expect anywhere from 3 to 4 hours of mandatory overtime and I fear that number just kept growing and growing. You'll also get a new manager. Who may also be useless for anything except for whining, showing up in chat only to chastise people and then go quiet for several hours. Was losing my shift which I had worked so hard for (getting top tier stats), in the middle of a process that meant changing my shifts radically over four times in six months, with three different managers/sets of coworkers. *Turnover rate, as you might imagine, is very high. You'll see many of your friends (who are often more helpful than managers and really keep you sane at the worst moments) disappear and the work load increases. More mandatory over time. When I first started there was a huge hiring spree and they promised to do away with the worst aspect of the job. People would say "you think that's bad, at least they don't do this or that anymore". But slowly it all came back due to there not being enough people. When I left the morale was BAD. It got to the point where even the main chat was getting close to outright trashing the company. *No raises and promotions are quite rare. I wasn't aware of any change in position during my time there. This reinforces the turnover rate. *To get to managers, they are either overworked or simply lazy jerks. I've had great, friendly managers who were always there and I've had managers who were both stuck up and completely useless and absent. In many cases I've been stuck with a customer who was 100% determined for a manager, only to be completely ignored by my own or other managers. Not a good feeling.
