Pros
Great benefits Ability to work from home
Cons
Pay was competitive before Covid, but no longer is. When I was hired, the company prided itself on paying higher than the going rate in the area, but when Covid struck, wages stagnated and have been surpassed by those employers CBE prided itself on paying better. Speaking of wages, if you’re looking for merit raises or bonuses, this isn’t the place to go. They want superstars, but refuse to pay what t takes to have superstars. The past 2 years, our pay raise was 39 cents per hour, which is well below the pace of inflation and the cost of living. Also, everyone gets the same pay raise, so the highest performer and lowest performer are essentially treated equally, removing the incentive to even do the bare minimum. Most sups are great, but upper management is out of touch and has little respect for their agents. There is no direct or open hostility toward us, but management is dismissive of our concerns and has no tolerance for even valid complaints. This makes it difficult to approach them with a work-related issue because any negativity is immediately shutdown and is often accompanied by a threat of being removed from the team if it continues. Since most of us work from home and are spread across two states, it is impossible to have valid concerns addressed. Management also has a zero communication policy. The past couple of months there have been significant and rapid changes, but when asked for information we’re told nothing more than “this doesn’t affect you.” It may not affect me directly, but rapid change is concerning and, in the absence of any communication from management, agents come up with their own. None of us know what the long term plan for the company is, yet we watch daily as the bread and butter of what we do gets moved offshore and co-workers are moved off the fraud contract. Is their job security? Maybe, maybe not. No one knows, because nothing is communicated. Management is also inconsistent in applying rules and policies. Attendance policy is no more than X amount of callouts in a bi-week, but it was never enforced. Then management decided they wanted to enforce the rules, but that obviously didn’t work because their authority was gone. So then they changed the attendance policy and tried enforcing that, but again, their authority was gone, or at least not taken seriously by the agents. LOD is 92.5, but that’s only haphazardly enforced, so the DA process stops and starts as management decides it’s too difficult and there are too many agents requiring DAs, and then deciding that rules do need to be enforced, and then goes back to deciding it’s just too difficult and there’s too many agents to stay on top of discipline. For some teams, the expectation of performing multiple jobs is constant. It’s not uncommon to be online taking calls and have a member of management reach out to you to complete offline work in between calls. If there’s enough space between calls, this isn’t an issue; but when calls are back to back, seeing management post in team chats a rhetorical question wanting to know why offline work isn’t moving. As stated above, the cost of living has far outpaced our wages — the past 2 years, we received a 39 cent across the board pay raise — so expecting our screens to constantly move for 7 1/2 hours every day is a pace that is not sustainable. Also, if you’re trained to take calls in every queue and to work the offline specialty items, you get moved around a lot. Is there any added pay or incentive for cross-training or promoting? Absolutely not. Pay is entirely dependent upon your shift. If you start with the shift differential, then lose it by moving to an earlier shift, then promote back to a later shift, you lose the accrued hourly rate because promotions are based upon shift and not the position itself. It is entirely possible to take a pay cut to promote. Finally, they used to only promote from within, but that’s no longer the case. There’s no ability to promote higher than a Team Captain, so if you get there, that’s as far as you can go. (Yes, there are sups, but there hasn’t been a sup or trainer promotion in over a year)