Chewy presents itself as a customer-first company, but that image comes at the direct expense of how employees are treated.
This is THE most demoralizing and dehumanizing workplace I’ve experienced. The issue isn’t customer service work itself, it’s how Chewy has structured and enforced it.
Agents are placed into nonstop call queues with no buffer time between calls, often not even a few seconds between one goodbye and the next hello.
Despite this, Chewy still expects thorough account documentation, forcing employees to either multitask unsafely during calls or use their breaks to catch up.
Break policies are extremely restrictive. Employees are given only a few minutes per day outside of scheduled breaks to step away from their desks, including for basic needs like using the restroom. This creates unnecessary stress and raises serious concerns about how employees are valued.
Chewy relies heavily on AI-driven performance tracking that often fails to reflect actual job performance. Agents can deliver high-quality service and still be penalized if specific keywords or phrasing aren’t detected by the system, multiple times which leads to redundancy, fatigue, and vocal fry due to the constant barrage of calls that come straight through.
Feedback becomes inconsistent and discouraging as employees are told they’re doing well while being scored in ways that suggest otherwise. It's never good enough.
Save for a good few, we're spoken to rudely by a condescending upper management if we have to escalate calls and even then we're only allowed a certain number before it reflects poorly on us, regardless if a customer specifically requests to speak to a supervisor. So we might be getting screamed at by a customer and then yelled at by a coworker too, for just doing our job.
The expectations Chewy sets are not aligned with the reality of the workload they create. The result is burnout, high turnover, and a workforce that feels undervalued, unsafe, and replaceable.
The customers are not the problem. Chewy’s internal practices are.
