Pros
- Flexible scheduling, including (limited) work from home options. - Management wants* to see you succeed (see negatives). - Some products are excellent to support, with strong training structures, good mentors, and available resources for questions and complex issues. - Amazing co-workers at the Charleston and Indianapolis offices. Just incredibly smart, driven, and thoughtful individuals who want to help their peers meet their metrics. - Tons of free food, beer in the office sometimes, and generally speaking excellent corporate culture. - The offices themselves are actually quite nice. - Solid amount of vacation days, and overall nice benefits. - Blackbaud does understand that you have a life & family, and they actively encourage you to have a strong work/life balance. - On the whole the company seems to be growing, but there's a caveat to that.
Cons
- You are a warm body to answer the phone, never expect anything above this. Customer Support retention is a constant issue as people take better offers elsewhere, abandon ship completely, or transfer into different departments. So sure, there's job security, but only because no one wants it. - Some products are giant antiques that have insanely detailed and specific issues that you will never learn of in training. Essentially you rely on knowledge-bases and co-workers to (hopefully) find resolutions to case work. Meanwhile you're left hanging a live client on the phone or chat. - It is very rare that other departments are held to task when over-promising and under-delivering, Support is a constant crutch. Clients get very little training in product and Sales over-promises. - Very low pay from a competitive standpoint in the area, despite being the work-horse of the company. - Management might want to see you succeed, but if you're working on Edge Products it can take months for essential product development fixes to take place. Project Lead assistance on complex case work is a joke in some departments. - There are bonuses, but most are tied to "Stay in support for X amount of time and then you'll get this". - You can't get a promotion/transfer to another department outside of Support without having been with the company for over a year. It seems to be a consensus that upward mobility outside of Charleston is non-existent. - Product releases are constantly fraught with bugs, sometimes major ones. Most of the time Support has to come up with workarounds or apologize to customers for what is essentially awful Q&A. - The Renewals team does nothing but ask and plead with customers whose subscriptions are coming to an end to stay with their products/packages. There used to be a pro-active approach towards keeping customers engaged and happy but for some reason that died. - The company may be growing, but they're definitely not investing in their employees. Instead, all funding goes towards new program features and projects, while at the very same time undercutting or out-right removing practices and Support in place for others. They claim it's to save money, but even if that's true in the long run Management doesn't realize the damage they're going to be doing during the transition period.
