Pros
The HR team are so inadequate that I was able to be made redundant by noticing that they had not adhered to employment laws surrounding the redundancy process. Also had not honoured the reasons that they rejected my initial appeal (read: begging to be let go).
Cons
Diligenta acquired my employment by being lucky enough to convince Lloyds to TUPE transfer my department and others over to them, effectively outsourcing their work whilst still reaping the benefits of keeping us to deal with their customers. Well, those benefits I'm sure have not been worth the hassle for the affected products in Halifax Financial Services, Clerical Medical and Scottish Widows. Their "incredible" system BaNCS is dreadful, slow, not user friendly, and the opposite of intuitive. They have strict processes for every requirement which are inflexible and work to the detriment of both customer, and call handler. By having offshore servicing teams the communication within the business to get things done right just falls apart, meaning things are often done wrong several times before it is fixed. After moving all the Lloyds Banking Group work from Bristol to Edinburgh (which was managed absolutely atrociously) we faced redundancy or relocation to Aviva who they also work for. The redundancy announcement came roughly a week before March's lockdown at the beginning of a global pandemic, which Diligenta must be very grateful for as it stopped the immediate haemorrhaging of staff who instead reluctantly stayed for the temporary job security - myself included. I was given the old bait-and-switch when I was unluckily moved over to Aviva, as on day 2 of my training, I was then informed the REAL role I would be doing was in an entirely different department to that which I was initially informed I would go into. Working at Aviva was not convenient to me, as it meant my office was now in BS34 instead of BS1 - which as you might gather is a fairly substantial distance which ate into both my wallet (now requiring public transport) and commute time. No financial reimbursement was offered to cover these or adjusted shift times. Diligenta values nothing more than a captive work force, and so I fought my move within Diligenta rather than resigned primarily because they seemed to welcome resignations as the cheapest way of letting the demoralised staff go. 5 months after the move to Aviva I was finally free to leave with redundancy, 13 months after the original announcement and now carrying the scars of deep stress, frustration, anxiety and depression over this time. At every point where it felt like normality had resumed after another change for the worse within Diligenta, we were struck with a new change with further ruptured the work environment - whether that was up-skilling without increased salary (ie, more work, same pay), refusal to level out pay discrepancies, increasing staff surveillance by managers, or adding new systems to increase the already burdensome number of different logins and bureaucratic steps needed just to do something like request holiday. They even asked us to download an app which would have a disturbingly wide range of unnecessary accesses to information stored on our personal devices, in order to log our hours despite these already being visible on other systems to the necessary lines of authority. Internal progression is practically non-existent, they won't inform you if there is a salary increase involved prior to application for some internal moves, and it is a series of tick-box interviews/cover letters which does not actually look at any track record of achievement and so means the empty vessel sounding loudest will often regurgitate enough buzzwords to tick the boxes and get the job ahead of more qualified candidates. The above is by no means a complete list of issues within Diligenta, but are as much as I have the energy to outline. If you have other options I would highly recommend you take them before working at Diligenta. They would probably make for an adequate first job, but to echo the words of a manager formerly at Diligenta, don't stay longer than 1-2 years because it will slowly destroy you and will not offer suitable progression or pay rises to sustain any personal growth.
