Pros
The job is steady and consistent. To the company's credit, they have transitioned all employees to remote work in light of COVID-19, and I am grateful for the ability to work at this time. Solving complex issues, especially when the customer is grateful, is both engaging and fulfilling. The pay is adequate, though not great or even necessarily competitive for the area, especially when starting as a contractor. Coworkers are great and the rare instances in which we can collaborate together always leave me impressed with the range of talents we have as an organization, even if those talents are not often recognized or rewarded. This job is not physically demanding. Despite all the negatives that come with working here, it is still a desk job where you can sit in climate-controlled offices while working.
Cons
Our customers, while normally agreeable, can occasionally be very difficult to deal with. Management has a strong tendency to bloviate about positive change while doing very little to effect that change. Some of the applications which agents are hired to support are extremely challenging to learn. Despite long training periods, retention of new contractors is very low. Out of a class of 20+, 1-5 might be left after peak season. Low contractor retention results in severe understaffing, which has historically caused 3+ hour phone queues. Support staff are commonly either excluded from company-wide meetings slated as "all-in" or are pulled early to take calls or chats which have piled up as a result of management's refusal to close support queues during these meeting times. Contractors are regularly excluded altogether from these meetings and most campus activities. Increasingly frequently, management has taken the opportunity to encourage everyone during meetings to submit positive Glassdoor reviews. As a result of this, there have been a surge of very positive reviews placed by management as well as a surge of very negative reviews from current or former employees. The decision I've made to publish this review is a result of these transparent attempts by management to solicit positive reviews. There are significant discrepancies between what tenured agents earn and the starting salary of new hires, such that new agents being hired consistently earn more than their counterparts with years' more time and experience with the company. This is not to say that new hires should make less, but that management should be proactive and make sure that they are awarding adequate raises to those who decide to stay with the company. Despite having changed the format of the survey form which is sent to customers after calls to clearly differentiate between the customer's satisfaction with their interaction with the support agent (OSAT) and their satisfaction with Sage as a company (tNPS), performance metrics have since been adjusted so both questions impact the support agent. If the customer you assisted is extremely satisfied and ranks their interaction with you as a 10, but gives Sage as a company a 1 because they are unhappy that wait times were too long or that their support plan is too expensive, (both things that an agent has no control over and may not even be mentioned on the call) that 1 is still reflected on that agent's metrics. Software as a Service (SaaS) is a toxic and consumer-unfriendly business model that Sage is placing more and more emphasis on as it becomes the norm in the wider market. Management has placed a continually increasing burden on support staff to generate sales leads. This means that, despite customers calling support for help, they will end up being offered training, additional licenses, expert services, and anything else management feels can be shoehorned into support conversations. (Do you enjoy calling your ISP or cable company about issues with your service only to be asked if you want to upgrade your plan?) While management insists that lead generation should only be undertaken when it is a good fit for the customer, this is contradicted by their mandate that a particular percentage of interactions must be a good fit in order to meet rapidly rising performance metrics. For perspective on just how rapidly these metrics are increasing, in the few years I've worked here, they have increased from 4 leads per month (a flat amount) to 21 leads per month (average of 300 calls per month multiplied by an expected ratio of 7%). As other reviews have stated, consistency of quality of managers is extremely hit or miss. There are some managers at this company that genuinely elicit trust and respect - not only from their reports, but from those on other teams. Unfortunately, some (or more accurately, most) of the management team does not live up to this standard. Here is a short list of particularly egregious examples of a single manager's (reported and ignored) misconduct: outright refused a customer-requested escalation, tried to imply that sharing one's own salary information was illegal, and downplayed reports of inappropriate touching and staring by older male team members (on multiple occasions,) even actively meeting privately with and discouraging those affected from sharing their experiences. Even ignoring all other issues discussed here, reporting to this individual is what makes me dread coming to work each day.
