Kestra Financial reviews

- Management does not communicate with their teams at all. You will not have skip levels, you will not review your manage, no one will take or use your feedback, this is not a collaborative environment whatsoever. Management lays down the law so they only have themselves to blame for their repeated failures. - Communication between departments, between managers and their teams, and just across the company is consistently nonexistent. Lots of siloing of information so when someone leaves, their knowledge is lost because it was never shared or documented. And often service teams are given completely conflicting information on what our policies our, which leads to frustration and confusion among our advisors. - Kestra is critically understaffed. In 12 months, the concierge team of what started at 18 people lost 10 people. More than half!! Management waited until it was an extraordinarily critical and untenable situation to start aggressively hiring. And they blamed hold times on the remaining team members, saying we were just inefficient and needed to work harder. We literally couldn't get up to go to the bathroom without getting skypes from managers that we needed to stay on the phone. Most call centers have a percentage wrap/idle or unavailable time that is expected of their staff, which is reasonable. At Kestra they got rid of post call work all together! You had to go straight from call to call without so much as getting a sip of your coffee, and if you had notes to add, items to research, questions for other departments, service requests to submit---well all those are supposed to magically get done after hours. - There is no accountability with management. They will always find a fall guy among the boots on the ground. It's really disappointing. Management 100% does not lead by example - Training is a joke. The few resources available are all outdated, completely unusable by new hires. There is no system or rhyme or reason to it. If you don't encounter a topic or issue while shadowing, you will learn through trial and error and there will be no leniency for you not knowing something that you were never trained on. It's all trial by fire for sure. - James Poer does not care about his people on the front lines. He basically says it outright to our faces at every quarterly meeting and we all laugh about how ridiculous it is, but the proof is in the pudding. The top down attitude is that they do not care about their employees and it is pervasive to the "culture" of Kestra. - You will never get support from your manager. If an advisor is angry, you are at fault no matter what, even if you gave correct information and no matter how gently you handled the situation. They are so fast to throw you under the bus and never stand up for you. That include your manager vouching for you to THEIR manager. Again, they can't pin it on a fall guy fast enough.

Where to start?: - work/life balance: If you're looking for a role where you can leave at the end of the day, this is not the place for you. Brokerage Accounts specialist frequently have opportunities for "overtime". Sometimes it's optional but there are "strong suggestions" to work, especially when the onboarding team brings on multiple new advisors with promises that cannot be delivered due to understaffing. Concierge (the phone team) is overworked and understaffed. The position deviates from a typical call center in that you're responsible for calls, the follow up work to solve issues from those calls, emails from advisors, and everything else that other departments say isn't their job and won't touch (special projects). Most of concierge has to come in 1-2 hours early or stay late to even keep up. - Communication: Nobody talks to anyone. If Compliance is changing policy to comply with new SEC/FINRA regulations, the service teams are the last to know. When management makes changes to technology, the services teams (you know, the people using the systems daily) are asked for input that is NEVER used. For example, when the new NAO system went online in March 2017, members of the service teams tested the system and pointed out errors and inefficiencies weeks/months in advance. But management went through with the rollout that resulted in paperwork not being processed and submitted to the custodian for 2-3 weeks. What about policy changes that affect advisors? Instead of sending out mass communication to the field on paperwork policy change, some of management decided to inform advisors of policy change by just flat out denying paperwork in the system messages. If all else fails or you have any questions? Call Concierge. Even if they haven't been informed, they're still supposed to know. - Micromanagement: This is why everyone is leaving. Everyone in Concierge is scheduled to 15 minute intervals. Clock in, 8 AM. You get two 15 minute breaks and one 30 minute lunch. If it's not your scheduled time to be off, you'd better be on the phone or you'll get multiple messages from upper management asking where you are and reminding you what you should be doing. Stick to your phone calls, stick to your phone scripts. Are you just off the phone and wrapping up post call work and follow up? Nope, save it for when you're off the clock because that phone call has been holding for 20 seconds and it's a disservice to the advisors. What if you've got an important issue to take care of and escalate to management or need to report a technology bug that affects the entire system? Nope, the next phone call is more important. - Severely understaffed: For all the years I was there, the company was always understaffed. First the Account Services teams went through change and for a little over two months 1-2 people left every week in early 2017. An offshore team was added in India about 2 years ago but they've only recently received more in depth training to get them running efficiently. Concierge phone teams weren't equipped to handle high call volumes at a working team of 18 in December. So the plan was to hire at least 2 more spots to help. Well since the second week of January, 8 people have left that department due to promotions within the company, being fired, or leaving the company altogether and nowhere near that amount have been hired to replace them. What makes matters worse is that every one of those people had at least 1.5 years of experience or more and familiarity with the business, platforms, and established rapport with the advisors - The customer is always right: I've seen cases where an advisor will complain until management grants special permission for advisors to get away with exceptions that do not follow policy. If you grant exceptions to every advisor that complains, is it really an exception any more? Wouldn't it be more efficient to visit and consider a change of policy if that's the case? If you're wondering why you haven't heard of these inefficiencies, believe me when I say that they've been addressed. But everyone is too busy putting out fires that these issues aren't addressed. Those on the phones hear the complaints almost daily but are tired of reporting them because nothing changes. So why bother reporting any more? - Technology: Advisor Complete works ok when it works. When it doesn't (maybe 1-2 times a month on average), it's pretty awful and the call volumes spike accordingly. It takes forever to approve communication to the field letting advisors and staff know the system isn't down. It takes technology as quickly as a few minutes or as long as half a day to fix the issues. Until then those taking the calls and processing just had to find workarounds to get things done. Technology issues were more prevalent in 2017 but seem to have gone down for the most part. Except eSign. Something or another seems to be off with the eSign system.