Pros
They pay very well. Starting hourly rate is high and there are increases as you move up
Cons
Where do I begin? Impossible to get time off. Absolutely impossible. You want a saturday off? You must plan months and months in advance and you probably won't get it. During training you are treated like a high school student. Constant ice breakers, constant going around the room introducing yourself and saying your favorite food, animal, etc. to anyone who decides to pop in and introduce themselves. The job itself is mentally stressful. Constantly getting yelled at by customers and you CANNOT DO ANYTHING TO HELP THEM. The system is incredibly outdated, customers are constantly getting mysterious "rate increases" (but yet my insurance that I have with another company is consistently going down). I had to lie to so many elderly customers and try to make their price increase sound like a good thing when all I wanted to do was tell them to go somewhere else and stop paying this company. You are on the phone all day. If you log out too much to run to the bathroom or get coffee, that's going to mess up your stats and you will run the risk of getting a bad shift come shift bid. If you ask a supervisor for help and the customer happens to hang up and you are not at your desk, someone will come and log you out while you are away GETTING HELP. And if you happen to need help, most of the time you will leave the customer on hold for a good 20 mins. By the time a supervisor answers you, then pulls up the policy on their screen, reviews everything you just told them, and then explains what to do, most likely the customer has hung up OR even better, if they are were angry, they are now irate at the amount of time they were placed on hold. If you have a customer who requests a supervisor, most of the time you are left to say "oh i can have one call you back" which doesn't go over too well, but the supervisor just doesn't want to deal with it. It's a customer service job but yet you are not there to HELP the customer at all. I once asked a supervisor if we could make a small exception for something that I had seen done before but she firmly told me NO it has to be done this way. Later, i checked on the policy and saw a more advanced agent had done what I was asking my supervisor to do. Why couldn't I just be allowed to help the customer instead of her calling back and by luck getting an agent who could make exceptions? If you have an emergency and need to call out, you need to call about.....15 or so numbers. You must call the attendance line and then call every single supervisor until someone answers. Most of the time, the supervisor is not at their desk, they are "busy" walking around or hanging out at another supervisors desk. so you must call and call and call and spend a good 30 mins to get someone on the phone rather than just leaving a message. I thought we were adults but apparently that is no the case at CSAA. The customers are rude. I think it is due to the company itself. It is very rare to have a happy customer on the phone and it is due to the before mentioned rate increases and billing issues. You feel like you never know what you are doing but there is no where to go for help. Every single person you ask will tell you a conflicting answer and it will be very different from how you are trained or coached and you will constantly be guessing and hoping you aren't ruining someone's policy. The turnover rate is high. constantly hiring new classes of about 13-14 people, but only about 8 (if that!) actually will stay. LAST BUT NOT LEAST: you will have a script that you need to follow exactly and will get graded on.(and the grades influence what shift you will end up with) You can't leave anything out and you must try to sell homeowner's insurance to an irate customer who can't pay their auto insurance bill or you will be marked down. You must go through a million questions to just get to the customer's question and if they are angry, the script will just make them MUCH MUCH MUCH more angry. The script is tedious and you will say it 30-60 times a day. Customers do not follow the script but you must get that back on track and answer the questions the way you want them to in order to get scored correctly.