The pay is incredibly low. Operations personnel have to manage 60+hours of work in 35 hours since overtime is not allowed but training and meetings are mandatory. Yet they must somehow also manage to set aside several hours each week to read and take tests in order to make incremental raises. The raises bring you up to just below the standard market pay for this type of position. If you do not pass the tests they do not increase your pay. If you appear to have free time in order to do the "leveling" they will note that you have excessive free time and give you more clients so you can no longer manage effectively.
We were brought in with high hopes of advancement but then informed later that the only way to advance is to be able to move anywhere in the country and beat out hundreds of other people competing for the same spot (both internal and external candidates). Having the required experience for one of the better positions gained from inside or outside of the company will not guarantee you consideration for the position but being well known in the company will. IE be popular to get promoted!
High performers are rewarded by being given more work to do. If the clients like you and request you, it doesn't matter if you already have more than you can manage, they will get you because the clients come before the health and well being of the specialists.
Management would literally take the shirt off of a specialist's back and give it to a client. How so? Well, specialists are given a series of stats on everything. Everything is timed, survey cards are used even though it is proven that they are confusing to the clients, free things that are given away by specialists or their supervisor are counted against the specialist even if the specialist did nothing wrong to warrant the necessity of the freebies. The stats are used to determine if annual raises are deserved. Clients who leave the company, ask for another specialist for whatever reason, or complain about cost are all counted against the specialist. So, if someone else makes a mistake working on a client, the assigned specialist is given extra work to fix it and is then penalized financially when the client complains.
Every specialist I have spoken with has stated that they are overwhelmed and they feel completely out of control of everything. Supervisors micromanage but won't train specialists on how to handle situations should they arise again but prefer instead to report the specialists and count against them on their reviews. Many specialists told me that they began taking psychiatric medicines after working there for a while because it is the only way they can make it through the day. Many others are consistently out ill or on disability. The stress is killing us but it is nearly impossible to find somewhere else to hire us since most places want ADP experience, not Paychex' old employees.
By law employees are given break times. However, break times, including bathroom breaks and water breaks are rare because one must escape before the phone rings again and sometimes it just does not stop ringing. One must request permission to go to the bathroom. Heaven forbid that you have to get up to walk around because your butt goes numb sitting there for hours or if you get caught crying because of being screamed at all day for things beyond your control.
Other departments and management do not support specialists but prefer instead to dump more work on them instead of doing it themselves. They go out of their way to give extra work to specialists and to blame the specialist when a client complains rather than to explain that sometimes a specialist has 10 clients scheduled at the same time and cannot possibly call them all on time or that sometimes a specialist receives at least 30 new hires to key in a day (which takes at least 5 minutes each between calls due to a slow system that is "too expensive" to correct) and cannot possibly key them all in that same day. There is far too much work and no support.
To summarize, we are not paid enough to deal with the level of stress, the micromanagement and backstabbing by management, much less to have no hope of promotion within the company since high acheviers are punished with additional work.
