I wish I could figure out how this company still exists.
Pros
As pretty much all of the other reviewers on glassdoor have said, many people working at mindWireless are really awesome people. When you think of Austin, and the type of cool, young, eager, tech-savvy population it tends to hold, you'll find many of them here. Many of the guys and gals work extremely hard and have fabulous ideas; I hope that they all find or have found a decent job at a good company. The office and building itself is also absolutely beautiful. The cubicles that people work in are very comfortable, and the views can be very relaxing. These views may also be the only thing keeping people relaxed enough to continue to work here, even if it's only for the average few months or so.
Cons
Where to begin? I will be as objective on the issues as I possibly can. I greatly hope that this review is seen by upper management as well as potential employees, so that my complaints can be taken constructively by the management, and potential employees can have an idea of what they will be getting into. This isn't the worst company in the world, and it was a boon, mostly, to me for the time I remained there; however, there are some serious problems that must be addressed if this company is to not only thrive, but simply survive. -Salary- As a desperate young person in need of a job, finding that mindWireless will hire you with even a bit of tech experience is truly like finding the promised land. Maybe you don't mind that you will be absolutely gouged in the long run by being paid less than a line cook, after being told that "we need a starting place, so that we have somewhere to quickly go up from", and that raises can happen after a month or two. Sometimes, you just need a job, and a job with a company that interacts deeply with big Fortune 1000 companies is not the worst job you could land. You might mind this after a short period of time goes by, and you, as a competent and enthusiastic young gent or lady, find yourself working as, essentially, an account manager (because the actual manager quit a few days after you started), and, when you ask about the whole deal about going up from that starting place, you're told to wait. And wait. And wait. Until you realize that it's not going to happen. Should you be one of the lucky ones to actually get a title that corresponds to the doubled, sometimes tripled work you do, you will "go up" a little, surely. There will be emails all around, complete with silly pomp and mini-parties and a lunch or two with the CEOs. When you realize that you're only getting another dollar or two an hour though, maybe now making about the same as a line cook, you might not feel as elated any longer. -Employee Expectations- Attendance is the expectation most emphasized by management. For some reason, performance, making the client happy, and being innovative are not even half as appreciated as someone with flawless attendance, and this becomes evident almost immediately after beginning to work here. This may simply be a difference in the company values from my own values, but I found it bizarre to see hard-working people who handled issues swiftly and charmed clients easily end up being generally reprimanded for clocking in a few seconds late. Interestingly, the emphasis on attendance above all else is so heavy that, as some others have mentioned, you can easily slack off while at work, as long as you get there on time. This generates a very strange mood among cube-mates, when one person is logged as being the "YouTuber" or "Netflixer", and each person is presented with the choice of trying to rat out the culprit (which doesn't make anyone feel good, nor result in any disciplinary action by management anyway) or pick up the slack. This isn't horribly important, but as a final detail here, the dress code is utterly ridiculous. Even though clients almost never come to the mindWireless office, and the office is in Austin, where everyone wears cargo shorts and flip-flops to their engineering jobs, employees at mindWireless are expected to dress in business casual. Don't worry, you can still wear jeans on Friday... -Micromanagement- Probably one of the worst places for micromanagement I have ever witnessed in my time in the working world. Although the company tells you, even before hiring you, that they are not a call center, if you are hired as a Mobility Care Associate, please note that this is just a fancy term for "call center agent", no matter what they try to tell you. Your time in queue being available to take calls will be logged, your amount of calls and tickets touched are tracked and logged, and, even if you have to pee outside of your scheduled break time, that's pretty much getting logged every time. Being the awesome person you are, even after you develop very healthy, deep, working relationships with clients, management, who doesn't have the same kind of relationship that you do, will still force you to change things that you know aren't best. Your concerns will not be considered, no matter what kind of flowery words you are fed. Not to worry, though! Even if you are performing poorly whether intentionally or not, even when compared to your peers, you'll get away with it for, possibly, a very long time. This is because performance reviews are almost never done, which I personally believe is a clever way to never give those raises that everyone is promised. In five months' time, I never received any guidance or information about my individual performance overall, and was told that it would happen soon... month after month after month. -Turnover Rates- As other reviewers here have noted, employees come and go in droves. A big group is brought on every month or so, and, with their onboarding, several veterans will leave (this is extraordinarily impacting when you have a team of less than 40 people servicing tens of thousands of individuals.) Because veterans, especially middle management, leave so quickly at such a high rate, all of the new people are then shoved towards the new, open positions. This gives a feeling of false hope and accomplishment before the new people realize that they must now shoulder preposterous amounts of work with absolutely no experience or acceptable documentation for processes and client relations. For those who can't handle the unbelievably unfair amount of work, whether it's a very real situation of nervousness on phones, or dealing with clients that are consistently angry because their service is never constant, they jump ship quite early. For those who choose to hang on to the insanity, they will excel at what they do for a period of time. Eventually, the slights will become too much, whether it's the absurdly poor salary, the absolute inability to be promoted or receive a raise, the expectation to perform managerial work as an entry-level agent with no recognition, or just the fact that every single person around you is looking for another job if they haven't already put in their notice. -Tools- For anyone who has worked in any call center or tech environment, you know how important tools are to the success or failure of any agent. Good resources means that nearly anyone can become a successful agent for phone and email support of almost all issues that drive client contacts, and bad resources means that only those around long enough to absorb tribal knowledge can keep things running, at best. When no one on your team has been with the 14-or-so-year-old company for longer than 2 or 3 years, and even that is only one person, there are going to be severe problems if resources are not "good". And mindWireless's resources are categorically abhorrent. Tools used every day for logging and tracking issues are slow, break frequently, and were just created from strange freeware that some friends of upper management had made for totally different purposes. Boxes for agents are not updated with appropriate operating systems to keep everyone even, so you might have Windows 7 while the person next to you is using Windows XP on a terribly old machine. Documentation and resources for client issues and special qualities or contractual promises from client to client are either poorly written or non-existent, so all the new people thrown to the wolves must literally fend for themselves with each and every contact. -Conclusion- mindWireless has the potential to be an amazing company, and really should be, considering that they have been official since Y2K. I would not recommend working here to anyone, unless you just need something to earn a bit of money for a little while. So many people quit so quickly that it's utterly shameful. To the person who says that people are fired for being lazy or bad employees, I contend that that review is probably not from a real employee, simply because I only ever saw one person get fired out of the 15 or so who walked out while I was there. Also, no one that I have remained in touch with since leaving is working there anymore, and that is quite a few people, most of whom were very bright and dependable. While we all tried to keep quiet the emails sent around to everyone by some of the people who quit with a bit of a bang, we all knew there was truth in their complaints. As for clients, Service Level Agreements are a joke, and I have no idea why most of the companies who use mindWireless still do. Some companies, after whoever managed their account would quit, would have untouched emails sitting in a queue for days, and even weeks. When the hiring couldn't fill chairs as fast as the quitting was emptying them, clients would have to wait on hold for, sometimes, hours, before reaching anyone. This fact by itself speaks to how potentially lucrative and remarkably open the market for the kind of services that mindWireless offers truly is. It makes me sad that the company is completely wasting it, and I hope they fix their fatal errors before it's too late.
