Horrid hours - some daysI work 9am-7pm, others 8am-8pm, some 1pm-8pm with no time allowance for luch because YOU WILL clock in and out! If you are able to get a weekend off, expect for your check to be at least $200 shorter than it would have been otherwise because that is the only time the retail locations are busy. There is also a annual "blackout" from mid-November to mid January in which you cannot request any time off. there are people who have been with the company for 8+ years (usually as a customer service rep before their jobs were eliminated and they were made sales reps). Those employees have about 6 weeks of paid time off. If you and 3 other newbies have two weeks, and 5 other employees have 6, AND there's the annual black out, AND managment wont let more than one person be on vacation at a time, chances are, you'll have to take a random leftover week for vacation or let it roll over into the following year. Good luck seeing your family!
Inconsistent paychecks - As soon as you figure out a way to earn a decent living, expect quota to drastically increase, transactions that once paid $100 will change to $10, or things that once made up the bulk of your check will now be done BY YOU for free. Quotas increase almost monthly, but the pay designated for commission stays the same. In other words, the target commission amount hasn't changed but the amount of work required to get it more than doubled in one year. My pay has decreased $10k/year each year I've been employed with the company. The best way to make money is to sell the customer things they don't need, steal sales from the other reps without their knowledge, and find ways to add lines to accounts that the customer doesn't need added.
Management is absolutely no help. Upper management expects all 3 managers to sit by and "critique" the reps' sales performance even when there are customers waiting to be helped. Sales reps are expected to fix phones, explain complicated billing, show customers how use self-serve options that eliminate the retail employees, sell additional products they don't need, fix indirect agent mistakes and take the constant abuse associated with having to tell the customer about the new upgrade fee, loss of unlimited data, insurance deducticle and premium hikes, and whatever else will be changing within the week while management sits back and plays with their iPads waiting on their DM to tell them how high to jump. Management is also extremely uneducated and unprofessional. Some managers have no customer service skills, don't know how to use the point of sale system, and say whatever they have to in order to gain the employee's trust, knowing it's completely untrue. Others have no idea of how to be professional, and some call-in and take off so much, you forget they work there. However, if you have a doctor's note that requires you to sit down for part of you endless shift, they won't even honor it. The assistant managers do as little work as possible until the district manager or his boss visit - then they suddenly remember what's in their job description.
The only way to move up in the company is if you're "friends" with the right people. If you don't have a special relationship with the people that count, you won't be anything but a sales rep. I have been with the company for years and am almost finished with my third degree yet I can't even get an HR rep to contact me for an interview. Meanwhile, I just found out my district manager just completed his first. Nice.
No changes are ever made with the employee's lives considered. The shareholders get richer and richer at the employees' expense. The employees are more exhausted with each passing year due to the constant change in rules, service offerings, conflict resolution methods and pay.
All in all, for single, money-hungry, brown-nosers that couldn't care less about right and wrong, this is the perfect company for you!