Pros
*Work from home on a hybrid schedule (When I was moved up to CA 2 (Customer Advocate II) I was able to stay work from home permanently, however, I believe they are only offering in-office positions now. *Fast Increasing pay (start at $18 move to $18.50 in 3 months and then $20 after 6 months as long as you are on par and meeting their "standards" *Co-Workers and company "vibe" is always positive
Cons
*There is only so much training they can give you and even after that 50% of the calls you will get you won't have the answer for. For example, they taught us the ins and the outs of the website and how to use the admin site to help customers. However, a lot of times you will receive calls regarding issues that you were not taught like title issues. This happens more often than you may think. Some titles are lost and no matter how many requests you may send to the titles team they can track them down. This leaves the customer advocates in a terrible position because they are left with no answer to give the customer. What's even more frustrating is the title team is non-customer facing so you can not even get the customer in contact with them. This often leaves customers aggressive and angry and it leaves advocates with no answer. This leads me to my next con... *This is by far the most annoying and frustrating part about this job. This is also something that has made multiple people I know and myself resign from the position. But, trying to escalate a customer is next to impossible within Carvana. Essentially how escalations work is, you have to post in a Slack channel requesting a Team Lead or a Senior Advocate to review the account and either help you out or agree to escalate the customer. Once they review the account, which can take up to 20 minutes if not longer, they will respond normally asking if you have offered compensation or offer a "solution". 99% of the time this solution they offer the customer does not approve of. Then the customer typically wants to speak with management. Which should be an easy thing for them to do right? No... Most of the Team Leads do not want to handle these escalations so they throw it back on the customer advocates. One response I got from a Team Lead after having a customer on the phone for 45 minutes and trying to get it escalated for a Team Lead to take over was "Nah man you still got it". Most of these escalations are handled like this. They will just respond and say "This is not something we would be escalating". Now, all Team Leads are not like this, but I would say about 80% of them. This isn't even the end of the escalations. Let's say you were actually lucky enough to get a Team Lead to escalate an angry customer it is NOT a live escalation. The customer must wait 24-48 hours for a Team Lead to "review " the account and give them a callback. Even then this happens maybe 50% of the time. I would receive at least 3-4 calls from customers saying they were waiting for a callback and never got it. This puts the advocates in a horrible position. Even when this happens they still refuse to take the call right away. During my 7 months at Carvana, I only was able to escalate 3 calls live. One time in particular that I can remember was an angry customer whose car had been delayed 6 times and did not want to speak with advocates anymore. She wanted a team lead and wasn't getting off the phone until she got one. I sent my request and I talked with a Team Lead who once again didn't want to take the call. I was on this call for 2 hours and all the Team Lead told me was to wait until your Team Lead (each advocate has a team and a specific team lead however, you work with all of them) gets in. After 2 hours, finally, my Team Lead clocked in (my Team Lead was great and was the only reason I stayed at Carvana for more than 3 months) and I updated him on the situation. He promised the customer he would call her back in 2 hours as he was about to go into a meeting. This 2-hour call could have been avoided if the original Team Lead just hopped on and helped the customer. *Horrible PTO/Sick Time... At the start of every year, you will start out with 40 hours of sick time which you can use at any time. Normal PTO is accrued by paycheck. Every paycheck you will receive 2.5 hours of PTO. So roughly every month and a half you will get one day off... Once you reach a year within the company you will double the amount of PTO you get per paycheck. Also, during tax season they have a no PTO blackout period. You can not use PTO for like a 2 and a half month span. You can still use Sick time, but no normal PTO as they are two separate things. Their turnover rate is terrible. My training team started at 16 and there were 2 of us left when I resigned at 7 months leaving just 1 person.