- You work from home, so the company thinks you don't need a living wage.
- Broken tools
- Minimum wage
- No raises, ever.
- Mandatory Overtime (Slavery)
- Work schedule changes weekly (see mandatory overtime)
- Shady Supervisors
- Clueless upper management
- Uninspiring CEO
- Irate Customers
- Back to back calls
- Micromanagement
- Extra pay for performance (P4P) favors poor customer service.
Let me explain further in painstakingly great detail to perhaps save a potential employees sanity...
Support.com's primary client and benefactor which is well known worldwide as "The worst company in America". With that said I will not put all the blame on support.com for their poor practices. Which they undoubtedly picked up quite a few bad habits from this symbiotic relationship to said company. The split is 60\40, with support.com being the lesser of the two evils. Essentially this client does everything it can to screw support.com out of providing the services it paid them to do.
Why and how you may ask? The why, well the client outsources to 3rd world countries who do the same job for far more less. They don't do a good job but they do it. How, the client knows support.com would sink without them so they take advantage of this. Just reference the public historical stock chart support.com for proof. They do this by removing or breaking tools that would allow us to help the customers. It is well documented that this client could care less about providing service to their customers. They never fix these tools but rather replace them with worse already broken tools and the cycle is never ending. You as an employee will suffer greatly doing this work. You will be excited at first to have a job and work from home, even motivated to actually help customers. Your efforts will be severely hindered due to a myriad of issues that will break you. Within my first 3 months only 2 from my training class of 20 were left.
Support.com is in a bad position due to upper management lack of finding other clients. They have now turned to blaming the employees for poor attendance likely caused by tool issue. It is rare for tools to not have daily issues that make it very hard or impossible to do your job. Imagine it is your job to take calls back to back for 8-12 hours a day but your already angered customer cannot hear you or you them. A call that should take 5mins is now 30min long. Good luck logging in on time to start your shift when its a gamble if the tools will work. Lower management will deflect the blame on you and upper management will have no clue about whats going on. Some of them acknowledge it but know nothing can or will be done since the company is at the mercy of such a corrupt client that is keeping them afloat. The level of cognitive dissonance for some of management is disturbing. Right now the company is doing a nonstop push of forcing you to work extra hours. This is nothing new but before it would last for maybe 2 weeks at a time. We are currently going on 6 months. If you work full time you are required to work double the extra hours or part time workers. This is obviously an attempt at burning out full time employees to pay out less benefits. There is often very little warning on when and how much of these extra hours will be required. So forget about taking your paid time off or plans with the family.
I once had a customer who was a psychiatrist who told me all of her patients who worked for this client were in a very bad place mentally. That is how serious this work is. During my tenure I have seen many disgruntled employees send out mass emails and IM's voicing their extreme displeasure of how things were ran. Due to this we are not allowed to email each other. Often employee's jokingly talk in the open of mutiny. Of the jobs similar to this that I have worked, I have never seen such a frequent high level of disgruntled employee's as this one. You might wonder why am I still working here then? I have seen the same question asked to all the employee's here as well. Many say it's the only job they could find, others are handicap, some don't have the courage or money to hold them over as they look for something else. Support.com knows this and ruthlessly uses it to their advantage. The company and CEO score is among the lowest you will see on this site and for good purpose.
The PR respondent will likely try to twist this with corporate jargon but too many of us who are actually on the front line keeping this company alive have spoken. I do this not to hurt the company or just to complain and moan. Maybe I will save someone their mental health and sanity before they make this leap to what seems a great opportunity. Be warned, there is little room for advancement. You can be a mentor working more for the same pay (but no calls, yay!) or assimilate and become a supervisor for more money and more headache. Raises do not exist but extra pay for performance is possible if you short change a customer on good service. It's very inconsistent especially if your tools crash too often due to bad luck and then your out of the drawings. It was not always like this, I'm convinced someone(s) at the client's end has it out for support.com. We were known for exceptional service among the other contractors. The sabotage of the service we could provide only gets worse. I put off saying this publicly for years but it's necessary. You've been warned.
