Pros
-Pay/Benefits: I believe the pay to be fair for technical support. Once you are a full- time employee, you also receive a monthly bonus up to 25% of your base pay. The requirements needed to receive the monthly bonus are basic, and with a little bit of effort, can be achieved every month. I've been in positions at different companies where a bonus can be tough to get with some of the outrageous requirements needed, almost feeling like you are setup for failure. I have not found that to be the case at Xactware. There is one requirement that has been an issue for me twice in the four years I have been here. (Covered later) The health benefits provided for full time employees are also very good. There is also up to 6.5% match to your 401k contributions. -Management: The management team has always been very kind and respectful to me personally. I have heard of similar experiences for other coworkers. Whenever I have had concerns, or wanted to provide feedback, it has been positively received. There has been an effort to try and understand what some of the issues are on the support team and rectify them quickly, with a renewed effort in the past few months to find out from each individual technician specifically, what feedback they can provide that would improve the department as a whole, or individually. The management team has always been easy to talk to, and great to be around. I have asked for advice from a few of them on career paths within the company, and I’ve always felt that their advice was in my best interest, and not trying to keep my tied down to the support department. -Upward Mobility: Over the few years I have been here I have seen multiple coworkers get promoted or move to different departments within Xactware. If you are active in reaching out and networking with other teams, and good at your job in support, there are plenty of opportunities for a career. There have been a couple of other reviews that make it seem like the support team is this black hole that you can never get out of, and it just isn’t even remotely true for those who are successful in support. -Training/Resources: There are a lot of different products that our team is tasked with supporting. I feel that training, especially now, covers those products adequately. In the past I didn't feel like the training really covered our advanced products to the degree that was necessary, but that has improved greatly over the past couple of years. There are still times that it can feel a little overwhelming trying to support a product that you have scarcely used yourself, but I believe our available resources and training are more than enough to be successful with each product we support. -Work/Home Balance: I feel that the balance between my work and home life has never been a problem since I started. There have been opportunities for overtime, or times when I have been asked or needed to stay a little later in the evening to finish helping a customer, but those times have been rare. I work so that I can afford to have a good home life. That has never been put in jeopardy at Xactware, in my case.
Cons
-Hurricane Season: Xactware provides software that assists with insurance estimating for losses and repairs. Because all of the major carriers use our software, it can get very busy after a hurricane hits. Months on end of that can get old quick, and morale can take a dramatic shift if it goes on for too long. Management does try to stem some of that by providing lunches/snacks, but it doesn’t seem to really help morale specifically over longer periods of extended high volume. Thankfully, that level of volume has only happened once or twice since I have been here. -Company wide recognition: Support is not the red headed step child at Xactware, but there have been times in the past when I have personally felt that the Xactware executive team could have done more to recognize the Support team, and the efforts put in to keeping our customers happy. I had an experience where I was at the same restaurant with the CEO, and I introduced myself and explained that I was in support at Xactware. He was very gracious and kind, and expressed how grateful he was at the time we put in for our customers during the hurricane that had happened shortly before. More of that, but it a more public setting, would go a long way. -Service Quality: Service Quality is a team inside of the Support department that are tasked with grading phone calls and chats with customers. The problem here is that this team is grading from a checklist of pass/fail metrics, and haven’t really had a positive effect on improving the Support team’s interactions with our customers. Unfortunately, the feedback provided is often unhelpful, or simply reinforcing what the metric requirement is, rather than ideas on how to improve. My issue is not with the individual members of the team specifically, but with the severity that the pass/fail items are applied. I know they are limited in how far they can stray from the metrics. Your grades from this team can determine if you receive a portion of your monthly bonus or not. There has been two months where a portion of my bonus was deducted because of these metrics. Based on enough feedback from other technicians in support, the process for Service Quality is getting revamped. I am hopeful that some of concerns will be addressed with that revamp. -Contractor Status: When you first start with Xactware you begin as a Contractor. You are technically going through a third-party company for your pay. During this time, you are not eligible to receive your monthly bonus, paid time off, or benefits. This period usually lasts between 9-12 months. Their reasoning for this is the number of full-time employee positions on the Support team is limited by the Xactware. Because of that, management within the support team found a way to hire contractors to fill positions that otherwise couldn't be filled. While I do understand their reasoning for this, it can feel stressful being uncertain of exactly how long you will be without benefits, PTO, or the monthly bonus. They do not hire full time employees from outside the company. Every time a position for full time employee becomes available, a contractor is given that position. I had to wait nine months to get hired as a full time employee, but since then it has been worth the wait.