Old and Neglected Technology
Shortly after working there, I realized Blackbaud is not a company that sees value in modern technology. The flagship product (not a SAAS offering) has a copyright date of 1987 and seemingly has never seen a major overhaul. As other reviewers have pointed out, Blackbaud has an obsession with Microsoft. Many of Blackbaud's SAAS offerings are designed to work best, if not exclusively, in Internet Explorer. When it comes to fixing bugs in the product, many—if not most—are closed as "Won't Fix". This includes bugs that seriously impact the customer's ability to use the product affectively. The same can be said for internal tools used by employees. Dated internal tools make the job unnecessarily more difficult. The Support team in Austin historically used Salesforce, but was migrated to Clarify in 2017, a CRM from the 90s. A major amount of housekeeping is required to use Clarify, resulting in more areas to make mistakes and customers having to wait longer to hear back from us.
Backwards Decisions by Management
The Austin Support team historically had the highest performance and customer satisfaction. Over the last year, as Blackbaud consolidated two major internal business units, our team had to adhere to the practices and procedures of the lowest performing teams. This involved the transformation of our team into a call center style of support. We had to take on much more frontline time (practically the whole day), which meant we were taking on more work with less offline time to do it in. In addition, instead of supporting the one product we knew well, we were trained on a slew of other products, resulting in us being a jack of all trades. Customers noticed this change and would occasionally question why Support didn't know as much about the product as they did. For certain products, new Level 1 agents don't have access to the client's instance, preventing them from being able to truly troubleshoot the issue. This has led to client frustration because some Level 1's still have the access and for the ones that don't, they almost always end up having to create a case, prolonging the answer for the customer. To go along with this transition, management began to focus on stats rather than employee and customer satisfaction. There are no scheduled breaks, despite Level 1 being an hourly position. I don't believe other teams in the company have to do this, but if one has a doctor's appointment (or some other commitment) during the work day, they have to submit the amount of time they missed as PTO, which pulls from the amount of days they can take off during the year. The most recent change we've been made aware of is the doing away with remote employees. From what I can gather, current employees who work remotely are grandfathered in; however, current office employees who request it will be denied. This is the complete opposite of what many tech (and non-tech) companies are doing all over the world. Many of the aforementioned changes were left for the team to discover on our own, or were announced via email. Management tries to downplay these types changes by saying things like "as we discussed before", very well knowing there has been zero discussion on the topic from management to the team. When it comes to new hires, management makes zero effort to introduce them to the team. Management also seemingly has no desire to keep current employees engaged. They have a "if you don't like it, you can leave" mentality and they assume negative intent before anything else.
Red Tape
Scheduling is done by a department within the company called Support Schedule, a team that has too much authority and will often make changes to your daily schedule without your knowledge. Any change you request must go through Support Schedule. If you're late, if a call runs into your lunch, if you have a doctor's appointment, if your computer crashes, etc. PTO is always rejected the first go-round because "that's the way the system works" and your manager has to request them to manually approve it. This adds a huge layer of red tape and can make the job extremely frustrating. The same is true for internal teams when it comes to customer requests as well. Requests have to go through so many teams to be approved, they often end up being misunderstood and delayed. Because of all of this, teams across the company end up passing the buck to avoid doing what's right for the customer.
