Pros
I was thrilled to find Transcom as I wanted to work for Apple as apple care advisor. The on boarding process was very smooth and well organized. The trainer was excellent and my classmates were wonderful. They send you a MAC computer, headset and phone base. You provide the internet and POTS telephone line. So you are on a set work schedule Sunday to Thursday 9-6 CST time for 3 weeks of class room training and one week of nesting. They do provide mentors during this time. All the mentors I encountered were excellent. This company is one of many who provide services for apple so if you are not happy there are better paying vendors out there you can search out. This is a good place to get a start. Met a few really nice people and made a few friends.
Cons
The do not assign work schedules until after training has been completed. So if you need to make childcare arrangements or work more than one job, you will most likely only have 1-2 days to get things in order once you get your production schedule. They tell you that during training that you must have 100% attendance and score well on your final assessment. This is how they rank you when you ask for scheduling preferences. They flat out lie. They go by final assessment scores only. So you can miss tons of class and as long as you score well on that final assessment if you want 9-5 M-F you will get it. It really sounds like a big ball of favoritism that I did not even bother to deal with. End result is a lot of people who are not happy with their work schedules. I would gather by the daily email requests for people to work extra time attendance is an issues. Some people did try to get better schedules using childcare as an excuse and were successful. Others just quit deeming the position as not suitable. There are also people begging to shift swap and to try to get Christmas off. Which is laughable because anyone with a decent shift and the days off that they want are not going to switch anything. Scheduling is a back biting, street fighting kinda of thing. If you got a good schedule the the rest of the world can take a flying leap. The excuse you got kids or family you want to spend the day with. No one cares. Everyone has someone they want to spend time with. The only pay time and half for holidays anyway. Is it really worth it for $16.50 an hour and some lame contest? There is also mandatory overtime during the major shopping holidays like right now. They try to wrap it all up and make it sound nice by tell you that you must sign up for 4 extra hours a week and you can pick the hours you want from what is available. If you do not pick hours they will be assigned and you will be responsible for them. So you basically have zero control over your life from December 26th until January 7th. They will change your schedule to include your start and end time, add or shorten your hours and move your days off around at will. But you are required to work whatever they throw at you. They have also been changing people's work schedules around "for business need" and telling you that you are responsible to work any changes. My scheduled during this holiday has changed 3 times in the course of a week. These changes are adding days that are normally your days off and giving you days off that you normally would not have. Its like this company thinks they own you and they can do anything they want with your time off. They do not have to give you any notice either. They do offer contests and give a ways for the holidays. This years is a 40 inch TV, Apple TV and Amazon Echo. You get tickets to enter for your extra hours and perfect attendance during the mandatory overtime period. Which is essentially the period from Christmas to the week after New Years. Be prepared if you get stuck with a schedule you do not like you will have to work it until the next shift bid. Shift bids are every 4 months and are based on metrics. They also work on an attendance point system. Leave early, late, miss part of shift or call out you get points. Call out on holiday you get double points. Points lead to write ups and affect your shift bid. So if you have an undesirable shift and issues with attendance you will continue to get poor or even worst shifts. With no paid time off. There really is no incentive for anyone to care about the point system. Its too bad this company does not see that. People will just use you and move to a new job..period. They have medical, dental and vision benefits. LTD and life insurance. NO paid time off. The medical benefits are all high deductible type plans not worth the money for medical. The pay is mediocre for the type of work your are doing at $11 an hour. Taking into consideration that there is one vendor with the same job for $12-14 hr and if you were a direct hire working for Apple you would start at $14-17 hr. Keep in mind this is a global company that claims to employee 30, 000 plus employees world wide. The branch of the company was the former Cloud 10 which most in the work at home world was known to be a questionable choice because of chronic pay issues and tools that did not work. It appears that is still going on. Your phone is your time clock. So you are not paid for set up time and if the software messes up which is constantly, each time you have to log out and reboot, you better be logging everything because they will NOT pay you. The responsibility for updating your time is left to your team lead(TL). There are a few that are nasty people working here in positions of so- called authority. Apparently they rose through the ranks really fast and are quick to puff out their chest. They claim to know it all. If you can deal with all the other craziness and keep your head down and stay away from the egomaniacs it might be worth your time as a fill in position until something else better comes along.