Terrible company that views it's employees as expendable robots
Pros
I would say that this is a great job for introverts, but the mental toll of having to listen to and caption some of the worst people in the country's private phone calls simply isn't worth it. Awesome coworkers who will become your best friends (unless they get fired) which they do frequently for underperforming and not meeting the unrealistic performance standards, relaxed dress code, okay benefits if you're full time, holiday pay.
Cons
This is truly a bottom of a the barrel dead end job with abysmal pay that should be illegal. I would only really recommend as a side gig. You will experience every single thing under the bigotry umbrella when captioning calls every single day. The customer base is entirely elderly people who are hard of hearing, so you can imagine the types of conversations you will hear. I can equate some of the caption sessions I've had to endure as torture. There was one instance where I had to stay on a call where someone was screaming everything they had to say for an hour and there was nothing I could do about it due to handing the call off being a violation of policy. They stress hard that you cannot vent about the calls to coworkers despite everything, yet they offer abysmal EAP to speak to a therapist. These calls will wear you thin, and you should not be at this job for more than a year if you value your mental sanity. The turnover is really really bad and for good reason. Everyone congratulates those who leave to find a better job. You will clock in and take calls immediately with mere seconds between them. There are 15 min breaks and a 30 min lunch in between. You have the ability to hand the call off to another captioning agent after 20 mins for the end of shifts, breaks, emergencies... etc, but this is heavily discouraged by your manager (TLS) Team lead supervisor. You will spend 20 full mins holding in your urge to use the restroom over this policy. It's absolutely demeaning, there is no way around it. Picture wanting to go home after a shift but a call proceeding on for an additional 20 mins after the time you are supposed to clock out. There are weekly tests called "clear calls" where they send a fake pre-recorded prompt to see how your performance is and it is completely rigged against you. If you get lower than an 80% on the test, you are heavily punished. It feels like being ambushed, there is a constant feeling of paranoia throughout the call center because of this. The speech recognition software that they use is still in beta, and they are constantly updating the backend. I.E. It breaks over and over again every single day and yet you are STILL expected to score over 80% on these call tests when the program is completely unstable. If you try and fight back against the results, the grading system is completely in the favor of whoever your team lead supervisor is. And when I say there is call center beef, they have the ability to covertly dock you points for not being enthusiastic about the test. You are at the whim of if your supervisor likes you enough not to dock points. Pizza party instead of promotions. You will be given a raise of a mere .25 cents per year. Even if you get a position as a TLS the pay only goes up $4 from a measly $12 /hr base rate, I have no idea how they get away with this from the board of labor standpoint. They constantly boast about how seniority means job security- but when I worked there I watched 3 or 4 people who held the job down for 6 or more years be laid off with zero warning. Completely spinless behavior. The PTO policy is a joke, because you have to apply against other coworkers from other call centers. For a company that boasts so much about the sheer number of agents they have, they are always hiring and there are monthly referral emails to try and get you to rope your friends into the job. The only open times to request time off are at shifts that start at 11PM and end at 4AM at times. You have to request for vacation time a year in advance and the upper management is very upset when you take time off. I tried requesting off for a doctors appointment a month in advance and my manager scoffed and laughed at me. No medical benefits whatsoever at part time and if you are part time, they only give you 4 free yearly therapists visits (which you will need after having to listen to some of the terrible things the clientele say on the calls). A frequent joke around the office between coworkers was that these calls were so loud at times that it could cause the captioning agents substantial hearing loss, yet the company doesn't even offer insurance for that. The company is at the mercy of their FCC contract and have been sued for breaking the policy, and of course they take this out on their employees instead of cleaning house with upper management. The CEO is very detached from the company altogether and the monthly update videos are a complete embarrassment. I came into the job expecting to help people who are hard of hearing, but it turned out that we were only boosting the ego of the higher ups. I was employed during the COVID pandemic and this company dragged it's feet in letting it's workers go home and do the job remotely despite having a remote system running for years. They worked on a tier system depending on if you were a good robot and passed all those rigged performance and metric test calls on if you could go home or not during a global pandemic. This was purely because the company values it's overhead running call centers. This job could be 100% remote, yet they don't care enough to work with the FCC to make better policies. Coworkers would get COVID and spread it through the entire call center, but when complaining to upper management they would just shrug from the comfort of their couch. You are treated like a number here, and the day that I quit I could feel an enormous weight lifted from my chest. Climbing the ladder is a pitiful illusion, do yourself a favor and don't apply here, you are better off anywhere else. You are worth so much more than what you have to experience working here.