Pros
Discounted employee phone plan, good health benefits, personable CEO’s who know you by first name.
Kontras
While the founders of the company are great people, their vision is distorted when translated by those in middle management. I intended to work for them for years to come, but am quitting after almost 5 years because of middle management. Employees with the most customer contact are treated as if they are disposable and easily replaceable. As a Lead, the procedures and job requirements are not in writing. Yes the stat and attendance requirements are known and communicated, but there are hundreds of minor rules that are not told to everyone, cannot be referenced in any electronic or printed form, and these rules change at the drop of a hat without warning. Even though you don’t know all the procedures and extended training is not available, you must follow these procedures or get fired. No matter what department you work in, unless you are admin or higher there is a vague term called “work avoidance” that is used to describe anything the management perceives to be dilly dallying. For example: you help a customer by phone. The call ends before you can finish noting the account. A new call comes in and it is a callback request recording that speaks a number and the customer’s name. If you don’t hit 2 to call the customer back before the customer’s name is said twice, you are guilty of “work avoidance” and get fired. You were working. You were writing clear notes on a customer account and could not do anything to prevent the new call from coming through. But because you couldn’t double up your work by writing notes for customer 1 while talking to customer 2 you are disposable. Also, the primary customer base is senior citizens who have minimal experience with phone technology. CCI has no brick and mortar store location where a senior can go for help with say, a master reset or simply learning how to connect to home WiFi. They often don’t even know how to turn on the phone. CCI will expect you to be able to handle an average of 6-7 of these calls per hour. If you don’t, you miss stats and lose your bonus or get written up. It is unreasonable to place an employee in a phone queue where they can get at random a large number of calls each day where a senior citizen needs to handle removing the center most two pieces of a 3-in-1 SIM card and reading the print on it, then expecting the customer to be talked through how to insert it in a phone, go through WiFi setup and then place a phone call before the employee can end the call: this cannot be accomplished in seven minutes. If the majority of customers are not capable of this, then your employees should not be expected to accomplish all of that in seven minutes or less. HR claims to offer overtime when you work more than 32 hours per week. In truth, when at our old building less than two years ago everyone got a huge pay cut because flex pay was going to be offered. They at the same time got rid of UTO. As an example, someone who was making $17.00/hr and had a UTO accrual for personal days (up to 2weeks per year) had to sign a form that says they no longer get UTO because they had flex days to use. They had their pay cut to just over $15/hr and then for any hours over 32 they’d get a pay increase that ended up with them earning $30/check more than they had at the old $17/hr rate. So essentially the company was giving a $2/HR pay cut to anyone who wasn’t in house 5 days per week. One year later the flex days we were given were taken away. Instead of having one per week, you can only accrue up to 2 days per month. If you aren’t in the building 40 hr/week without missing days, then you accrue flex hours more slowly and don’t get the 2 days per month. So the justification for our pay cuts was the flex time, which was taken away with no adjustment made to our pay scale. Ridiculous changes like this are made frequently without any surveying of those affected. It is confusing at best. You are expected to know how to troubleshoot devices that you have never seen in person. Not all phones sold by the company are available to you to see, and the ones that are are not live so that you can’t troubleshoot easily. If you do choose to get a demo phone to help understand a call need better, you are required to hit an ACW button on your phone. This means after call work. ACW time counts against your “occupancy” which is a stat they use to determine your retention as an employee. So essentially because you need a tool to do your job well, you are punished for going to go get the tool which may be up to 100ft away. They brag about the “knowledge base” where you can learn about troubleshooting steps. But this is not more than a number of PDF documents which are not key word searchable. The titles are often obscure so that it is hard to find what you need while on a call where the customer is talking or yelling and the clock is ticking. You can’t take bathroom breaks when needed unless you use ACW time, which causes quite a few employees to have adverse health effects from dehydration since we are all afraid to drink water on shift. A large number of employees suffer from depression, and cigarette or caffeine addiction because the baseline requirements are so difficult to match that we are nervous caffeinated wrecks by the end of the day. You can take a thousand successful calls in a month, but forget to say “I can help you with that” twice in one month and you don’t get your $300 bonus the next month, and you may lose your job. Minor errors should not carry as much weight, for when they do we feel paranoid and like you think we are disposable.
