If you are thinking about working for this company, do not work at the bank.. especially if the position you are applying for is for “teller”. Your job title might describe you as a teller with teller duties, HOWEVER, if you are in a branch with those “fancy new ATM’s”, you will be the adopter of the branch. What is an adopter you might ask? Well, let me explain. Adopters are those who get the misfortune of standing at the door for the majority (if not the entire time) of their shift and greeting customers while awkwardly trying to force them to say what they are going to do at the bank today. They also have to help the stupid people who don’t know how to work an ATM and force a conversation on the people who use the ATM’s. Some times the people at the ATM don’t want to have a conversation, and it is awkward when they don’t want to have one, but it is your job to make them talk to you. Me personally, I use the ATM so I don’t have to talk to anybody. Nope, not at Chase. You have to talk to every single person. Guess what else you get to do if you’re an adopter! Absolutely nothing! Some hours of the day at Chase are slow. Which means standing around doing nothing but waiting by the door hoping someone comes in so that you can beat them down with questions like “what brings you into Chase”, just for them to be like, “nope, I’m going back to the teller”. It also gets annoying to hear “oh, these ATM’s are going to take your job”. Toward the end of my time with Chase, I started not to care and would respond with “that’s okay, they can have my job. I don’t do anything anyway”. Customers would also ask, “why do you guys promote this ATM so much? some times it is not faster than the teller” most of the time I’d agree to spare an argument. But they were right. Some times there was a line at the ATM, but not the teller! It was ridiculous at times because the back teller would be on their phone while I’m at the front trying to herd cattle. It is your job as an adopter to force everyone to use the ATM’s. The more people who use a teller, the worse the branch’s numbers are. They only have you up there because they only care about numbers. And you HAVE to stay put at the front. You can’t leave unless you have someone watch the front for you, most likely a banker. Even if the banker agrees do watch the front for you, they do so reluctantly. Nobody likes to be at the front. If there was a big line at the teller, and no one was available to watch the front, you’d have to let the customers wait and have the back teller do all of the work, which was frustrating because they were sometimes so slow. Then I’d have to hear it “is there no one else to help”. There was nothing I could do. Chase puts more of an emphasis on its ATM’s than it does their customers. It is also embarrassing to have to ask someone to watch the front to go to the bathroom. It makes you feel like you are in kindergarten all over again. Everyone else gets the freedom to walk around and go to the bathroom whenever they’re not with a customer. But adopters have to wait. Adopters are pretty much the butt of the company. They are the first face a customer sees, which means the angry customers that come in are going to start yelling at you just because you’re the face.
Tellers/adopters don’t get paid enough to deal with all of the bull corn you will deal with on a daily basis. Pay is nothing less than 12/hr anymore because Chase does not allow employees to be paid less than that. It is still a sad wage. It puts you under the poverty line. If you are with Chase for awhile, expect to not get raises past a certain dollar amount. You will have a better salary at WalMart. Sad, but true.
The employees that you will work with are all fake. It is sickening to watch them be fake with certain customers, and then talk mess about them once they leave. I also noticed how much behind they kissed when it came to people who had money. They treated them extra special so that they could sell financial products to them and make the compensation money. But the people who came in and had no money, they would get treated like vermin. They are also fake to your face. Most of them are alcoholics. It’s understandable because I can tell they are unsatisfied with what they do. It is funny to me because they always complain about the bad pay, but they stick around at Chase because they don’t know what else to do with their lives.
If you are a teller, you will mostly report to the lead teller. Some branches have multiple lead tellers, depending on how big the branch is, and some will just have one lead teller. If there is one lead teller, they are the lead teller operation specialist. It is just an excessive title for what should be assistant manager, only they are not paid like an assistant manager. They have just as much, if not more, responsibilities as an assistant manager. Chase is downsizing and most branches don’t have an assistant manager anymore, which is why the LTOS position exists. The LTOS at my branch would get almost 50 hours every week, probably to compensate the sad pay they get. This was unfair to the other tellers, as we were only able to be scheduled a max of 20 hours, 30 if you were a favorite. Which brings me to my next con, favorites. If you are not kissing enough behind to management, expect to have less than 20 hours a week. Also, expect to always be the closing teller if you’re not a favorite. It is annoying to be the closing teller because half your day is gone because you will go in mid-afternoon, which means you’d better get all of your errands done in the morning. On some days of the week, the closing teller will have to stay with the LTOS while they restock the ATM’s. This will cause you to leave close to 7. Most LTOS’ are lazy as well. They expect you to do all of the closing duties by yourself while they click around on Amazon instead of balancing their money. They think they are above the things you do, when in reality, they are also a teller just like you.
Chase has all of its employees do monthly assessments. Most are redundant, and if you score less than a 90, it hurts the branch’s numbers. Chase also adds a bunch of pointless training every month for everyone to do. They expect you to finish it between customers, but some of the training tasks will time out if you are inactive for some time. There are also monthly questions called ICSC’s that the LTOS has the pleasure of bothering everyone with. It is a required task that Chase makes everyone, except financial partners, participate in. They are lame questions that get asked such as, “can you explain to me what we do in a burglar situation?”, and you have to give step by step instructions, or else the LTOS will tell you the answer needs to be more specific.
Every individual Chase branch’s success relies heavily on OSAT scores (customer satisfaction surveys that are sent out to random customers who have recently visited). Every morning during the huddle, we will go over numbers and we find out how our OSATs are. We get categorized as bronze, silver, or gold, and anything with a score below 65 is nothing. If we finish in any of the three categories at the end of a quarter, we get money for the branch to celebrate and we also get a bonus. However, the bonus is a joke. A huge percentage is taken out of the bonus check due to taxes. At Chase, you are just a number. You are easily replaceable. I watched a banker get fired due to failing numbers, but this man was with Chase for 23 years. Instead of coming up with a solution for him, he was let go. The next day, he was replaced with a different man. It happened that quickly!
Hours at Chase are long and dismal. Open at 9, close at 6. A little known fact is that all Chase banks actually open 10 minutes early and close 10 minutes late. Which means that someone can walk in at 6:09 and cause a banker to stay until 7:10. You’re lucky if you get a lunch break. Every state is different when it comes to break rules, and in mine, it is not a law to mandate brakes. It is ethical to allow a break though. If you work a certain amount of hours a day (i.e. 9-5), you’ll probably take an hour lunch break. I as a teller worked 6 hours, some times more, a day, and I would never get a lunch break. I would always leave work starving. It is also difficult to stand for 6 hours straight. As an adopter, they did not allow us to sit down. On the weeks where I would have to work 6-days straight for a month because other tellers were on vacation, I would go home and have to ice my feet. I’m actually in great shape, yet I was having feet and knee problems. Dress shoes are not the best shoes to wear while standing around all day everyday.
If you start off as a teller, you can probably have a good chance of moving up to a banker or manager. But if you want to apply for a corporate Chase position after being a teller, forget it. It is difficult to move out of the branch setting if you are a teller. It’s not worth it though. There were corporate Chase employees that would come into our branch some times and they would often throw shade about Chase when talking to me. Haha.
Telling people I worked for Chase was cool because it made me sound important.... just as long as they didn’t ask what I did there. Once I said I was a teller, they’d give me a MEH face and say “oh...” Then it’d become awkward. Leaving Chase completely was the best thing I did for myself. Walking out of that branch for the last time was like walking out of prison.
