Kazoo Reviews

3.9

65% would recommend to a friend

(70 total reviews)

Patrick Manzo

Not enough data to show CEO approval

62% positive business outlook

Kazoo has an employee rating of 3.9 out of 5 stars, based on 70 company reviews on Glassdoor which indicates that most employees have a good working experience there. The Kazoo employee rating is in line with the average (within 1 standard deviation) for employers within the Information Technology industry (3.9 stars).

Reviews by job title

70 reviews
2.0
9 July 2021

A broken product is met with a constant stream of denial instead of solutions

Anonymous employee
Recommend
CEO approval
Business outlook

Pros

They do a great job hiring. Met so many amazing, smart, talented people. Strong focus on D&I initiatives

Cons

The product is basically unusable. It is a patched together group of barely functioning features with such an endless series of major issues /bugs that nothing is ever fixed and the hole grows deeper by the day. Customers are completely disregarded once they…become customers and are confronted with the reality of attempting to implement and use a severely broken platform. The product team is celebrated by leadership in a feeble attempt to gaslight and deny reality. Thus creating a toxic culture and interfering with most employees’ ability to be successful in their roles at the most basic level. CS is expected to handle the fallout with no resources and no complaints (while being underpaid). The Sales team has tenured, talented reps who are expected to at best twist themselves into pretzels to evade basic questions about the reality of the product. At worst, the business puts them in a position to outright deceive customers with pieced together demos that make the product appear to actually work. The few performative attempts to acknowledge wellness and burnout felt absurd as leadership continued to ignore the root of the problem.

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Kazoo Response
4y
Thank you for your feedback. Kazoo, like other organizations, made business decisions to weather the pandemic; some of those had deeper impacts on the short-term operations than we anticipated. However, we have invested significantly across the last 18 months to proactively solve for some of the challenges you note, specifically to rebuild parts of the product that had not functioned as intended, and create an even better employee engagement platform. We are thrilled with the work of our Product and Engineering teams, and this new version of our Kazoo product is in final testing, with release to customers at the end of Q3. This will be a game changer for Kazoo. Specific to CS, we know that the team has been working hard to guide our customers through their journey with us. In the last few months, we have made intentional, specific investments in CS to help mature this function and prepare us for the next phase of growth. These include adding team members across the CS organization, developing tools and resources to help these professionals do their job, providing meaningful merit increases and promotions, and bringing seasoned leadership into the organization. We value every member of our #Kazoocrew, and hope that you will begin to see the change in your day-to-day work due to the intentional investments we are making. My door is always open should you prefer to speak directly with me to share additional questions or thoughts. - Paul Pellman, CEO
2.0
1 Apr 2020
Recommend
CEO approval
Business outlook

Pros

Projects never see through to finish so you never have to deliver working software

Cons

Every two weeks a new deadline means drop everything you've been working on and finish the next thing as quickly as possible. Extremely high turnover means no one has worked on the code for more than a year or so.

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Kazoo Response
6y
First and foremost, thank you for taking the time to provide us feedback. As a growing software company, we have a lot of projects that we’re working on as our business pushes for market share in the HR technology industry. In order to deliver the best platform for performance management and recognition & rewards as well as advanced data/reporting capabilities, we have a lot planned in our product roadmap. We think you’ve done a great job of delivering working software and our customers and prospects are pretty impressed with these projects. We definitely hear you on the shift in deadlines. The pace of work at Kazoo is fast to support deadlines to meet market and customer demands, hence our cultural value ‘be quick, but don’t hurry’. Better outlining our roadmap is something we are actively working on so we can lock down our product focus on an annual basis and re-evaluate priorities quarterly as we get a better understanding of current market demands and shifts. If you'd like to discuss further please reach out to us directly at People@kazoohr.com.
2.0
13 Oct 2021

Disheartening, Draining, Exhausting

Anonymous employee
Recommend
CEO approval
Business outlook

Pros

-Flexible work schedule & Unlimited PTO -They take DE&I seriously -Great people!

Cons

-low pay -no 401k match -high turnover -lack of consistent leadership -really clunky/buggy product -lack of follow through from leadership, product, etc. -culture is good, but it's starting to become toxic Kazoo is horrible to work at if you're in Customer Success or Support; you will be over-worked and under-paid, and you'll get a constant stream of really strange, vague wordy non-answers when you ask leadership questions or ask for help. They often just put a rug over giant hairy issues instead of making a real effort to fix them. This is clear in the shocking amount of turnover. The company is under 100 employees, and yet it feels impossible to ask people for help or assistance when needed. Product & Dev are overall condescending to anyone outside of their departments, causing a super toxic environment. New issues / oversights with the product surface daily, and they usually never get addressed for months at a time. It's disheartening.

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Kazoo Response
4y
Thank you for taking the time to share your perspectives. While I'm pleased to hear that you recognize many of the incredible attributes of Kazoo (great people, commitment to DEI and our unlimited PTO approach), it's apparent that we still have some work to do in overcoming post-pandemic burnout. The Executive Leadership Team (which includes me) is very focused on giving the overall Customer Success team more support. While historically we have had some breakdowns in communication across teams, we have made several significant investments and changes across the last five months to help support CS and our customers more quickly and easily (with even more to come). I have the privilege (and please know that I mean it when I say privilege) of leading the Customer Success team. I actually do, on a regular basis, join customer calls and I believe that I do have a good sense of what's happening on the ground. These observations, conversations with CS team members, and looking at our own CS/Support data, have informed a lot of changes and investments that we have made recently (including adding 25% more staff to the CS team since the early summer, and backfilling for a number of professionals who have moved to other roles within Kazoo). I assure you that I continue to be an advocate for the CS/Support teams so that we can make the best possible decisions for our company and for our customers. Last, you're right -- one of our legacy products (that we are retiring as we speak) was super clunky. Despite being used by a smaller number of our customers, a vast majority of the issues actually are tied to that product. That's why Kazoo made the investment 18 months ago to rebuild a better platform -- what we refer to as The New Kazoo. We are working hard to move clients to the better product, today, which will improve our customers' experiences, and those of our customer-facing employees. But, all that said, in reading your note, it's clear that the investments we're making are either not enough, the change isn't coming fast enough, or we're not doing a good enough job communicating with you. I'm always eager to hear feedback, but more importantly to do something with that to make a difference for our team, and for Kazoo. I truly welcome the opportunity to speak with you directly, should you want to take me up on that offer. Alternatively, your manager or a member of the P&C team is available to help us better your experience at Kazoo. -Monique McDonough, COO
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Glassdoor has 77 Kazoo reviews submitted anonymously by Kazoo employees. Read employee reviews and ratings on Glassdoor to decide if Kazoo is right for you.