I would not recommend employment with the Convergys Intuit project. I have never worked in an atmosphere that was less supportive of its employees. While they do offer a four week training program, the training is far from sufficient or effective, simply because there is too much information to convey in that amount of time. So, agents are ill prepared when they start taking calls. They are expected to rely on documentation that is ridiculously disorganized and incomplete. A search for a single topic can bring up thirty articles which may not even apply to the product they are supporting. Once a pertinent document is located, most of the time, it is incomplete and filled with links to other documents that may be redundant, obsolete or incomplete. Once an agent exhausts these “resources” they must then raise a flag to elicit help from a floor agent. There can be a five to ten minute wait time for such help and in some cases the floor agent rattles off a partial answer and disappears.
Agents are expected to take calls with only two minutes between calls. This gives them little time to complete their notes, perform any follow up or recover from what are typically exhausting, stressful calls. Agents are penalized for the amount of time they leave a customer on hold, which, on the face of it makes sense. But the only reason agents place customers on hold is because they are trying to search through poorly organized, incomplete documentation, wait on assistance or struggle with a computer system which often lags.
If agents are late to work or sick, they are penalized with “points”. After accumulating a certain number of points, they can be fired. At the same time, because it is nearly impossible to schedule vacation time, agents accumulate a fair amount of PTO. Yet regardless of how much PTO you have accumulated, this PTO cannot be applied to your sick days unless there is PTO available for that day and you call in and claim it. All of this goes on in an atmosphere that is, by design, antagonistic to employees.
A majority of the customers are in a hurry or dissatisfied with the product. Often they are irate. Sometimes they are in tears. Yet, agents are expected to quickly produce answers for topics that range from payroll to reconciliation to taxes to accounts receivables/payables, conversion issues or frequent technical glitches on the part of Intuit. To say the job is stressful is a gross understatement. Added to the stress of handling calls is a two minute recovery time, a list of goals in terms of productivity and the stress of knowing you jeopardize your job every time you are sick or need a day off to care for a sick child or spouse or need time to see a doctor or dentist.
Recognition comes in the form of pizza during busy seasons or $5 gas card raffles, which is appreciated since the pay is so low that food and gas can be hard to come by on such a salary. There is recognition from customers who actually call in to praise a particular agent. Beyond that, there is no individual positive reinforcement aside from certificates of improvement, and even those suggest your performance was previously poor. Only errors are pointed out in an atmosphere where management and half of the supervisory staff are unprofessionally unfriendly. Yet they wonder why turnover is high. Incredible!
