ecobee reviews

Support and the rest of the company are in two separate offices and it shows. Very little communication between the two, with Support receiving little to no notification of important product updates/changes needed to do our jobs properly, resulting in longer-than-needed ticket resolution times and frustrated customers and agents who feel useless because we weren't properly informed of significant product/UI updates. Getting vital information from the development/product side of the company feels like pulling teeth, yet it is integral to offer our customers proper support or our products. Many agents are trying their best to resolve ongoing issues with our products, but many of these issues involve intervention from the development teams in the other office, so many of us feel powerless and have to continually apologize to customers for issues beyond our control. One particular issue still shows no signs of resolution (I won't say what it is but anyone in support knows EXACTLY what I am talking about), and we're powerless to do anything about it except take the brunt of complaints from our customers and pretend there's anything we can actually do about it since we're the face of the company. Overall morale in our department has been very low for the past 6 months and shows no signs of getting better. There's a positive culture here if you look at a surface-level, but we're inadequately staffed to the point that work-life balance is not possible (it's encouraged, but is practically impossible given the current workload). There is no feasible way to get a week's work done here anymore without playing catch-up at home and risking burning yourself out by working through your weekends. Customers are frustrated by long wait times and take it out on us. We're put in a difficult position where we have to explain to customers that we need them to call back and wait in the queue again and many customers are highly resistant to this.

Unfortunately there is a small handful of people in the next level down (middle management) who somehow got hired into ecobee despite being neither capable nor qualified as either individual contributors or people leaders and the exec leadership team won't seem to address this. Our design team for example doesn't even have anyone in the leadership chain with real UX design experience (vs. just visual or UI design or experience managing designers but not actually doing). We were hoping the backfill for our departed UX director would fill that gap but unfortunately the position got rolled up into the VP Product who, while a nice enough person, also lacks hands-on understanding of the UX discipline. These underqualified middle managers are unfortunately insecure and toxic, ruling through fear and intimidation, seemingly afraid of being exposed, defaulting to blaming their direct reports and other contributors for both real and fictional issues to uphold their false narrative and have even gone so far as to lay off some. For whatever reason these behaviors from managers have been allowed to continue unchecked, and as a result innocent yet capable/skilled employees have been gaslit and forced to leave the company, both voluntarily and involuntarily.