A good company, good stepping stone, but don’t get stuck in the call center
Pros
27 days PTO per year (in addition to holidays), decent health insurance, excellent dental. The company was very effective and flexible in their COVID response. We worked entirely from home for the last 1.5 years but I did not stay to see whether they will actually go through with the transition back to the office. They gave us extra PTO to vote and to get vaccinated. Made about $65k per year in the call center (base +bonus). The pay is better than most customer service jobs, but the responsibilities are also more complex than most service jobs. They pay you to study full-time for about two months so you can get your FINRA licenses. Once licensed, salary was permanently increased (not just a one-time bonus like some other companies). Next, there’s extensive classroom training for the actual job, then a gradual, supported transition to working on the phone. Overall, the culture was open and positive, at least in the entry level positions. Your team members will be happy to help you. I genuinely liked my coworkers - great people from many different career backgrounds. You don’t have to have finance experience to get into this job. Within the call center, there is a lot you can learn and extra projects to join that will hopefully get you off the phone for a bit. The NCC consultant job is hourly, with a consistent schedule, no weekends. When you’re off work, nobody is bothering you. The senior leadership is more gender- and race-diverse than any other company I’ve worked for.
Cons
TIAA’s products and services are unnecessarily complicated, leading to frustration for clients. You deal with the typical stress/abuse from difficult customers. You have to keep up with tons of detailed company policies, product rules, employer plan rules, and Federal, IRS, Insurance and FINRA regulations that are frequently changing and not always well-documented. There’s a lot of miscommunication and passing the blame between different departments. It took 7 months to get through licensing and training to be released to work on the phone on your own. Most people agree that even at that point, you’re still not fully competent. It takes maybe 6 more months before you feel comfortable in the job. The consultant job is somewhat of a catch-all. We do not just perform account maintenance and transactions. We also have to address processing issues, educate about investments, income options, and taxes, discuss long-term planning, provide technical support, teach clients how to use the website, teach them how to complete our complicated forms, make referrals, sell lifetime annuities, asset retention etc. Some of my coworkers remarked that in other companies, they would be transferring the calls more often to specialized teams. Call center is understaffed, and that leads to constant back-to-back calls, mandatory overtime during busy season, and it’s harder to get PTO approved. EVERY thing you do throughout the day is recorded and measured, down to how many seconds you spend doing different tasks, and that gets tiresome. Upper management constantly changes the way performance is evaluated but then as soon as everyone is on board, the goalposts are changed again before we even have time to see the long-term effects of an initiative. It seems like they might be doing this to keep consultants from getting too good at certain metrics and maximizing their performance evaluations. You get reassigned to different managers frequently. They trade you like a playing card based on your stats. The associate and middle management levels are still very heavily dominated by white males. In the end, I left because of the back-to-back call burnout and because I was strung along for over a year in terms of my development within the position, plus there weren’t enough opportunities outside of the call center.