It’s what you make of it! - T1 IOS Chat Advisor Kelly Employee Review

-Raises and promotions are largely predicated on customer surveys. These surveys make no differentiation between the customer’s satisfaction with YOU, the Advisor, and Apple, the company. Most — if not all — of my ‘very dissatisfied’ customer surveys had nothing negative to say about me (indeed, most went out of their way to compliment me) but were frustrated with Apple. There’s nothing you can do about this, and your supervisor seemingly has no power to dismiss the survey; They will always accept it, and it goes on your survey record. Yes, it’s relatively simple to ‘bury’ these with positive surveys, but it’s still a woefully unfair practice towards the employees. IF supervisors are permitted to disregard these surveys, I’ve certainly never seen it done. -Benefits, vacation time, and sick leave are not earned until you’ve passed a 90-day period. Certain states require sick leave to be earned per X number of hours worked — Kelly even provided a PDF upon hiring acknowledging this state law — but there is no clear way of seeing what time you have available. -Most situations, like the one described above, are answered with “ask HR” or “ask staffing.” It’s like team leads and managers are specifically told not to share certain information or they’re not ever told the answers to commonly-asked questions. -3 full absences in a 90-day period will result in discipline, up to and including termination. This is a somewhat reasonable policy. What is not reasonable, in my opinion, is their habit of counting technical issues as absences. For instance; Let’s say your network is disconnected. All of your other devices in home still connect to the internet. You call the ‘help desk‘ line, and they’re seemingly trained to do everything in their power to place the issue on your end. Called your ISP and they cleared any possibility of an issue on their end? Doesn’t matter. You reset your modem/router, swapped out the Ethernet cable, and restarted your Mac? Doesn’t matter. You’ll still be gigged. Half-absence if you’re gone between 16min and 3hrs 59min, and a full absence if you’re gone over 4hrs. There are excuses absences, such as for inclement weather, but you’d better believe they’ll be marked as non-excused until you talk to 4 different people to get it sorted. -So, as a Phone Advisor, you talk to one customer at a time. I’m sure they have their own set of stressors unique to their position, don’t get me wrong. But as a Chat Advisor, how many customers do you think you’re obligated to talk to? Three. And each customer must be responded to in under 2min. That may sound like plenty of time, but it’s not, I assure you. You’re sprinting back and forth, and it’s stressful. You’ll be given a month (after about 5-6 weeks of training) of two chats at a time, then it’s on to three. Three customers at once, each with their own issues. You’ll have three different support articles pulled up (usually more; it’s unlikely the customer’s issue can be solved with one article), you have to log each case in detail, classify each case, and enter/look over each of their information. According to some other reviews on here, Apple HR was told of this, and did not approve. Whether that’s true or not, who knows? But now we’re doing every other week; 2 chats then 3. Then management has the gall to sit around scratching their heads why there is such a high turnover rate. Maybe if you send out another e-mail reminding us how much attendance matters everything will be fixed! -As stated in the ‘Pros’ sections, the pay is weekly and definitely reliable. However, you’re paid far less than an Advisor working directly for Apple (but good luck getting one of those positions). -Your managers seem to think that things like ‘leadership’ and ‘morale’ mean sending friendly and/or threatening e-mails en masse, setting up competitions between chat teams in order to improve ‘production’ (naming them things like ‘Chat Wars‘ and using ostensibly copyrighted images in doing so, no less), and dangling mediocre discounts, temporary raises, and cheap bonuses in front of you. The leaders you deal with are either ‘yes-men,’ or folks stuck in middle-management in their 40s but think they’re *really* important and not as instantly replaceable as the rest of us. These are folks that always use ‘leadership’ as a collective noun to describe themselves (and you’d better believe they capitalize it, because again, they’re really important people) and yet very few of us actually want to be lead by these people. There are good low and mid-level leaders here, but even they’re restricted in what they can do for us by upper-level ‘Leadership.’ -You have 5-6 weeks of minimally interactive training. You sit there and listen. The interactive bits are half-hearted and sloppy; They usually don’t even work. The ‘final exam’ is open-book. Yes, seriously. There is also little-to-no screening of employees prior to the start of work, aside from a basic background check and a typing speed test. What does this mean? Well, when you continue a chat that another Advisor started, you can read their transcripts. Good Lord. Fully half of the transcripts you read you’ll see that the Advisors are barely literate, rude/abrupt, and many just pass the problem on to another Advisor to deal with. Yeah, I’m sure a lot of this is due to the stress mentioned above. But prepare to work with a lot of less-than-intelligent folks. -You get to choose to have two consecutive weekdays off, one weekend day of your choice and one random weekday, and I believe there’s one more option. Regardless, it’s 5 on 2 off per week, and the schedule is pretty random and wacky. Your start time fluctuates 30-60min per day, although your end time is set, thankfully. When you’re first hired, you’re stuck on whatever shift your hiring wave was brought on for, until you’re ‘allowed’ to bid for another shift. I got very lucky and was placed on the shift I wanted, but most folks aren’t so lucky.