candid critique from an AMERICAN
Pros
About the only positive thing I can say about working for TeleTech is that it felt good to be able to help customers who called in and actually fix their problems, and have them express genuine gratitude for the assistance. Those occasional moments of appreciation were what kept me going.
Cons
I had the misfortune of being employed by TeleTech as a work-from-home phone agent, providing technical support for TurboTax customers. The job lasted 6 months, and the levels of utter cluelessness, mismanagement, and short-sighted incompetence were baffling. The stubborn reliance upon badly flawed software like SalesForce and IC-Client was extraordinary. Customer service would suffer greatly from daily glitches, while us phone reps would have to scramble to give customers excuses for whatever technical problem happened to come up that day. Calls were routinely dropped and customers hung up on when us employees attempted to transfer them to another department. Dealing with angry customers was a soul-sucking experience, which was made even worse by the fact that us employees felt powerless to do anything about it to actually effect change, our hands tied by the restrictive policies and multiple layers of "chain of command" at both TeleTech and Intuit (parent company of TurboTax). Most departments at TeleTech refuse to even take phone calls, instead choosing to hide behind their emails and only offer online or "chat" support, most notably the Human Resources dept. There was a ton of offshoring to foreign countries, along with indecipherable accents, badly-worded corporate communications riddled with typos and poor grammar, and a fundamental lack of understanding of US culture and communication styles. If you call up your local cable provider or credit card company, and are frustrated to get some clueless foreign rep stationed in whatever unknown country overseas, TeleTech is one of the driving forces behind that happening. Working at this job had all the frustration of the red-tape and hopeless bureaucracy of a government entity, and the mind-numbing inefficiency right along with it. The month of "virtual training" we had didn't prepare us at all for the "real world" day-to-day customer problems we would encounter, and getting paid less than $10/hour for all this was an insult. Just watch the movie "Idiocracy" for an idea of how this company operates: the ignorant arrogant over-reliance on automated systems and flawed software replacing the logic of actual people. Sad, really.