Pros
Please do not believe the commercials. The only people who may be happy working here are managers. Any positive reviews were written by management to make it look like working here is great. When the company employees receive the "Great Places To Work" email survey, management forces the employees to take the survey together as a group with the managers to ensure the answers are positive.
Cons
• If you are one minute late, you will not meet schedule adherence and will be marked negatively. • If you have to go into Personal Aux to go use the bathroom, because you’ve been holding your pee and it’s still an hour until your next break, you will not meet schedule adherence and will be marked negatively. • If you were about to log out to go to break, lunch or leave for the day and you get the beep indicating a caller is on the line and the call gets complicated and runs over, you have to stay and assist no matter how long it takes and no matter how it may negatively impact your schedule adherence and/or your personal schedule. • If you have something come up unexpected, and you have personal business hours but your “unexpected occurrence” isn’t on Synchrony’s approved list of items, then you can’t use your Personal Business time. • If you have a family emergency and you’re on the floor/taking calls, your loved ones cannot get a hold of you. You’ll have to wait until your break, lunch and/or end of shift before you can speak with your family. No cell phones are allowed while you're at your desk taking calls. • All your calls are recorded and you're being graded based on software that is not 100% reliable. Workstation (the software/program) glitches, shuts down, freezes and overall does not always perform the way it’s supposed to and yet the call center associates metrics and jobs are dependent upon it. If something’s off with Workstation and it messes up the call center associate, the call center associate is in jeopardy vs. management looking further into Workstation and what may be wrong with it. • Management shares that a Customer Service Representative is not here to help customers but to get them off the phone as quickly as possible. We are not here to help but to do what we can to ensure they don’t call again. • Your call time is supposed to be 3 mins or less per call. Going through training doesn’t truly represent what will happen on the floor. It’s understood that you can’t train on every single item that may occur but being told that you’ll mainly be taking payments and waiving late fees is false. Most people call because something out of the norm is going on and they need help. So most calls are not simple which means your call time will typically be long. • Important updates that involve changes in processes are sent via email and then the Customer Service Representative is expected to read these communications and keep up to date while continuing to take calls and always be up to date on what’s changed. Sometimes the changes are a little complex and additional training would be beneficial. Sometimes there’s off phone training but most of the times there’s not. • Taking verbal abuse from customers and having to remain calm and being forced to read from a script or potentially face termination if you allow your feelings (that are rightly felt when someone is treating you like dirt) to get the best of the situation. • Customer Service Reps are expected to be IT experts but are not paid extra for it. Each client should have a Digital Tech team but they don't. Customer Service Reps are supposed to have low call times and yet when someone calls and needs someone to hold their hand as they try to register their card, or set up Auto Pay, or is having overall IT related issues with an App or with getting into their account…the Customer Service Representative is stuck on the call until the customer gets access. You cannot have low call times and help people with IT and online/eservice matters. • Dealing with Multi Client Schedule Bid process. Upon being hired, you don’t really get to pick a schedule that truly works for you; you have to select from what’s available. When you get that schedule, it is not permanent. During the Multi-Client Schedule Bid time, every person is ranked and depending on your rank order, you are scheduled to select from an entire new list of schedules (your current schedule may not be on the new schedule bid list) and by the time you get to select, what’s left may not work for you. If you have to make it work, you’ll have to rearrange your childcare, any scheduled doctor’s appointments, etc. If you can’t make it work, you have to resign and it’s a great way for them not to have to perform layoffs and potentially be on the line for any earned unemployment benefits.