My experience wasn’t a great one.
The first month was module training, which would normally be fine, but the software I had to learn was very sophisticated and all the training videos were filled with static and words cut out constantly. It made it frustrating because key words would just be flat out missing. The trainers just shrugged.
When you hit the floor, you aren’t ready. And it takes up to 6 months just to feel like you know a little bit about your product as well as the different disjointed systems to do your job. You have to “be the expert” when most of the time, the customers calling in are experts and know a lot more than you. And they can tell when you don’t know what you’re talking about.
When you start, you’re level 1. And if you have a case that is beyond your abilities, you usually send it up to Level 2 for help. More times than not, it felt like Level 2 would do everything they could to not keep a case... even when it was clear it was way beyond the abilities of a level 1 specialist.
There were many times I had to go to my team lead to make them keep an obvious l2 case.
And if you have a case that requires you to reach out to another team... Good luck. The communication between teams is abysmal. There’s a lot of “Not my job.. not my prob”... attitude. It feels like no one knows who does what, when and how.
And when our development would make updates to software and break basic functionality, there were just shrugs. And those fixes could take months to fix. Even though we broke it. It felt like there just wasn’t a lot of urgency to help.
Front line Support is held to metrics and timing rules where we need to get back to the client by a certain time. We’re told the development teams have the same rules but in my entire time there, it was VERY rare they would ever stick to it. If I wanted something done, I’d have to message development over and over, ask my team lead to bother their team lead just to get things to move. Otherwise they could easily sit there for a month (or longer)and never get looked at. Then I get the bad survey.
There were times where months would go by and then the development team would just close the case. No explanation. Wouldn’t even check to see if the customer was good.
There’s so little accountability on other teams it’s ridiculous.
And get ready for the Account Exectutives to over promise what our products and support does. They will promise the world to the customer to ensure they get a sale and when we have to inform the customer of the reality of what we can do, the AE will deny all accountability and complain and fight us. Also they will deflect any requests you send their way if you need their help.
I felt that I had to fight Blackbaud just to get customer help. There are so many obstacles in the way to provide good customer service that I don’t blame customers one bit when they judge us negatively. It didn’t matter how much I voiced my concerns, it would just be more shrugs and “this is how we do it”. Customers pay a lot of money to talk to us and get help and we just drag our feet. It didn’t inspire me for the future of the company.
Also, they’ll bait you into support with promises of career opportunities... good luck. There were a lot of promises made before I was hired and all of them were backed out on. Especially when COVID hit. Bi yearly raises nixed. Seemingly for a year and a half. When it was part of the agreement for the position that one would get merit raises every 6 months. 401k match is gone for the foreseeable future... it seemed like a good chunk of benefits went away.
People I knew that spent a couple of years in support finally got out to another department only to be laid off weeks later. And the only olive branch was a position back in support. If you want a career in support, there’s good job security. But getting out is difficult because they want to keep you in support.
I ultimately left because Based how support functioned, I wasn’t proud to work for the company. I dreaded going in because every week it felt like something new was implemented to make our job harder and our customer’s experience worse.
