Pros
The benefit of working from home
Cons
Work from home; spend paychecks on therapy.
Once COVID began, we had the benefit of working from home; though not before we had 'training' to operate the systems from home. Our 'training' was supposed to be nearly a week, but at the literal last moment it was decided that training would be cut to five hours and then we were sent off like birds from a nest.
Even working from home had its issues and my mental health suffered from it. We had minimal breaks allowed without counseling or reprimand for stepping away for too long. (Anything over 4 minutes was too long.) Anytime a question or issue arose; good luck trying to reach a supervisor or manager for an answer, and your co-workers were too overworked and overwhelmed with call flow. You didn't have time to breath half the time.
For handling calls, it's common to finish a call and the SECOND you hang up, the audio would glitch out because the next call was coming in so abruptly. We were not allowed to put even a 10 second wait time in the systems to 'woo-sah' into the next call after dealing with angry customers but still having to upsell, upsell, UPSELL. If you don't upsell---Couseling, reprimand.
Chats and emails; you'd think it'd be less stressful but no. It was common for me to be operating three to four chats simultaneously, and if a chat is left unanswered or left on read for longer than 30 seconds, we had a supervisor 'checking in', which was their polite way of rushing us along and tended to lead to mistakes being made. Such as giving the wrong information to the wrong chat customer. On the rare day that it was calm with only one or two chats, we had to juggle emails into the flow if customers took too long.
When I joined infocision, which most of the workers I worked with called it 'info-prison'; we were honestly told 'For upselling; keep pushing until they say 'no'. If they say they aren't sure, if they don't know they can afford it, anything that isn't a firm 'no', keep pushing'...It's a certain type of soul damaging to have to be on a call with a single mother during COVID who is sobbing to me that she needs a basic package for her children to do homeschooling, and instead of getting to be a decent human and apologize for her struggles, I had a supervisor motioning me along to encourage her to upgrade to the next best package to ensure her children had the best connection during their quarantine...
Needless to say, if you'd like to learn how to be a boundary pusher, spend all your paychecks on therapy or anti-stress medications and want to do so while earning minimum wage that will go up in increments of $0.25 each year, then this job is for you!