Pros
The company is great, the CEO's care about the company and it is still run with a small business mindset of happy employees being better at providing a quality experience to the customers. Higher management regularly shows appreciation for the agents by checking in as well as occasional free meals for everyone. The schedule options are reasonable and most of management is happy to sit and listen to employee questions or concerns. Overall its a great attitude and despite the few hiccups I ran into, I would still be working there if I hadn't gone over my attendance points. It is entirely my own fault I got fired, and I would absolutely apply again if I was sure I could qualify to be rehired. I enjoyed working for the company.
Cons
Job is presented as a customer service position, however the focus is primarily on sales and tech support. Extensive training is provided in how to follow the sales script, and the different service plans that are offered but very little information is given in regards to the different types of phones for sale or which ones are best to recommend (or avoid recommending) to inexperienced smart phone customers. Customer Service portion of training was adequate, but the tech support was limited to one day of "this is how you navigate the Apple website to search for tips on iphone issues" and one day of going over a few of the basic common android issues. More of the tech support training was focused on how to ask probing questions than on how to understand the equipment you're working on. I expressed concerns during training and to my team supervisor once I was on the floor, about feeling inadequately training and extremely uncomfortable handling tech support calls but didn't get much help. I felt like I was just a warm body occupying a phone line in hopes of reducing the 45 minute hold times, despite the fact that my inability to resolve issues means those customers will be calling back again. I can only hope that on the next attempt they found someone more knowledgable, who could do more than follow a checklist of troubleshooting steps and encouraging them to Master Reset on the false promise that it will fix everything. Being told repeatedly to either follow the checklist or google tips and tricks for an issue, rather than being offered more in depth training severely damaged my confidence and trust in my immediate supervisors. I got waved off so many times while trying to ask simple yes or no questions that I eventually gave up asking for help and would just try to sound like I knew what I was talking about as I stalled for time and frantically searched Google for help sites where someone else described how they had resolved a similar issue. Don't get me wrong, I understand that there are countless issues that can come up with a cellphone, and its not realistic to expect to have even a quarter of those issues covered in training.... but when an employee self identifies a specific issue that they've been unable to resolve on multiple calls, it shouldn't be that hard to at least look into whether a training document might be created to cover that issue. I felt like a complete fraud at doing the job, knew that I was providing terrible customer service as I could not fix most problems, and absolutely hated one of my supervisors who consistently ignored my requests for help when I was stuck on hour long calls (while still lecturing me for taking too long, of course). As much as I was willing to attempt to continue struggling my way through in hopes of catching on with more practice, I was a little relieved the morning I realized that I was going to be terminated for running late when I was on my last half point on attendance. My primary interest in potentially applying again later is that perhaps going back through training, this time I would know what questions to ask during the Tech Support class in order to understand how to handle those calls better.
