Paytronix Reviews

3.2

49% would recommend to a friend

(86 total reviews)
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Jeff Hindman

64% approve of CEO

49% positive business outlook

Paytronix has an employee rating of 3.2 out of 5 stars, based on 86 company reviews on Glassdoor which indicates that most employees have a good working experience there. The Paytronix 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

86 reviews
2.0
11 June 2020
Recommend
CEO approval
Business outlook

Pros

-Youthful spirit because of all the college hires -Some employees are good and stay because of a comfortable grandfathered salary -You get thrown into the fire really quickly so can be nice for getting relevant tech XP -401k match and other benefits are pretty good

Cons

You’ve most likely arrived at this review, of this position, at this company, because you are a prospective TC candidate looking to join the Client Services (CS) department of Paytronix. Let’s be very clear from the beginning: the PX CS department is great for getting your first 18 months in the professional workplace on paper, but that’s about it. You’ll emerge from the other end having minimized your acquisition of new marketable skills, and having maximized your levels of professional and personal stress. If you remember nothing else of this review: when confronted with the 20-25% (not a typo) yearly employee churn rate of the CS department caused by the culture I am about to explain, the CEO of the company suggested that this was within their yearly projections for CS churn, and therefore no serious cultural revisions were required. Let’s break it down: TC Role coming out of college New College Grads are the raw resources that feed the machine. A lot of other reviews (please go read them) covered this in detail, just know that the details are true. You will be on call roughly 2-3 weeks of the year, responsible for tier 2 24/7 support of the Paytronix platform, and you will be compensated one vacation day per week. You will be encouraged (but not forced) to work more than 40 hours a week, since your client load will balloon within your first few months due to the astronomical churn rate of good TCs. On my way out, new TCs with 6 months or less of experience were expected to handle 10-15 enterprise clients on minimal training and thin understanding of the product. Which brings us to the next section: The Product As soon as 5 years ago, Paytronix was an industry leader because of its rock solid integrations to legacy POS (point of sale) systems including Micros Aloha and Positouch. Well, guess who in the restaurant industry still cares about rock solid integrations to legacy POS systems in 2020? The landscape of restaurant tech has changed drastically as restaurant chains begin to embrace big data and digital experiences. Paytronix was slow to move in this arena, and the product you support reveals this fact. You will be hired as the primary product consultant for your client load, and you will be expected to provide highly specialized guidance on waning legacy systems (POS, physical gift cards etc) as well as Paytronix’s modern tech (mobile apps, API integrations). This story alone isn’t necessarily an issue, and in fact is characteristic of most modern tech companies. Where Paytronix lacks is in their execution. All roads lead to the TC getting screwed. Products are released broken, buggy, and unsupported, and you will be expected to provide frontline support against “angry” clients to prevent them from churning. The product team is some of the hardest working at the PX, and truly do make a great attempt at listening to the client base, but in the end they are hamstrung by the fact that all major product decisions are made by the founder and CEO. Which brings us to the final section: The Culture Paytronix has a pervasive and disappointing top-down culture, it was the reason I left the company, and it is the reason why you shouldn’t join. Managers in CS exist only to fulfill the will of the highest leadership, which is to maximize client load while minimizing costs. There is no forward thinking in terms of planning for growth, CS is a giant Rube Goldberg machine that gets complicated stages added to it every day. The CEO maintains an iron grip on nearly all decisions made in the company, but especially the ones centered around product and engineering. Out-of-the-box thinking will be punished if it doesn’t fall in line with leadership vision. In Conclusion Having worked there for the better part of a decade, I was able to watch this sad story unfold. At a time, I was the biggest champion of Paytronix as both an employee and a fan of the product. This unfortunately faded as attention was shifted away from the people of Paytronix, and into the maximization of profit. Around 2 years ago, Paytronix was acquired by an investment firm Great Hill Partners. Great Hill Partners is the same firm that gutted the beloved Deadspin in its quest for profit. I make no solid claims that these two are connected, but the coincidence in the decline of the culture is uncanny. After your honeymoon period, working for Paytronix will be an exercise in staying afloat while you find your next opportunity. This review suggests not to try it in the first place.

2.0
23 July 2017
Recommend
CEO approval
Business outlook

Pros

Decent to good Pay Decent to good Benefits (including Health Care, 401k) They truly do let you take vacation whenever you want, which is a great perk. We have a great finance and sales team.

Cons

While 4 weeks vacation is good for traditional companies, for a startup like Paytronix, they should match the industry and competitors and offer unlimited vacation. The fact that you need to take a vacation day when you are sick is a very bad policy. Many of my coworkers work through sickness because of this. Be prepared to work at a minimum 50 hours a week after 6 months in, often hitting 60. Be prepared to work one or two weekends a month as well. When bringing this to the attention of our managers, we are told to "deal with it". The working from home policy is inconsistent based on department, direct manager, and seniority. With that out of the way, lets focus on the CS (Client Services) department. The roll is called a Technology Consultant or TC. The industry that we work in is filled with bottom of the barrel people. You will often find yourself explaining to a client how to open an email, drop in an image, explain how to open a different browser etc. Our sales process needs to vet if the companies we want to sign are worth our time. They will often have absolutely no IT team, and we will end up using more resources to support the client than money we collect. We are ALWAYS responsible for anything that goes wrong on an account, even when it is the clients fault. We have absolutely no leverage in telling our clients (or their managers at their respective companies.) that they are at fault for something. We always have to defend our sometimes hard to use software without being able to sympathize with our clients, this hurts our personal relationship with our clients tremendously as they view us to be blind of the shortcomings of our product. Myself and many colleagues in my department feel the same way about career development: Literally give up if your career path does not fit into their predefined roles. They claim flexibility in this when you start/are interviewing but that is a lie. The predefined rolls wouldn't be a big issue if they were at all diverse, but most of the time they are 90% the same job with that remaining 10% differing. I know this is why many of my friends left, and why many of us are now considering to leave. We are expected to give the same level of service to big and small clients alike, something that is not aligned throughout the company nor is it sustainable or scalable. This leads to tremendous frustration and lack of guidance for time management. Things they don't tell you about: On call - For one week (on a rotating schedule in a ~32 person department) you have to carry a phone with you and be prepared to answer a call from our clients from 8pm to 7am M-F and 24 hours a day on the weekend. They give you one vacation day in return, which you could argue is fair. They just tell you nothing about this during the interviewing process. Migrations - Luck of the draw here - Often many TCs have to stay up all night to receive a migration file from a previous provider to launch a new client. You are in no way compensated for these overnight or weekend extra hours, and are often expected to work normally the next day. We are not respected by the other departments. We are expected to QA features, launch new products, and train ourselves for new products. It took the department one year to learn how to properly deploy our survey feature because no one in our product or engineering team provided us with the proper training. All in all, I feel like we are in a glorified call center.

2.0
11 Mar 2021
Recommend
CEO approval
Business outlook

Pros

The biggest plus about working as a Technology Consultant at Paytronix is the coworkers you'll meet. If you want a career and not just an extension of your college social life, that probably isn't a good enough reason to pick a place to work. Benefits are good, and the starting salary (for someone just out of college) is nice.

Cons

It's hard to know where to start with the cons about Paytronix because the issues really build up over time until they're no longer manageable. The problems start to show right from the beginning - onboarding is complicated because the product has way too many half-baked features. Everything you learn will come with the caveat that nothing quite works the way it's supposed to. Management will rely on other TCs who are already overworked to train you, and when that fails, they'll throw you on the Support Line where you'll field calls from angry customers. Because turnover is so common, you'll probably move on to getting your own accounts pretty quickly, and that might feel good at first! Management will tell you they're impressed with you and give you a bunch of top accounts, but really what they're telling you is that they're strapped for resources and need you to work 60 hours a week without any support or guidance, and certainly without any pay raise. Yes, you will gain good customer support experience. However, you will absolutely not gain any worthwhile technical expertise. If you're looking into this job because you have a background in Computer Science or Engineering, I implore you to look elsewhere - you will not be fulfilled in this position. There is virtually no room for growth after a year of being in your role. If you're lucky, you may be able to transition to the DI team or Product team in a few years, but these positions are few and far between. Similarly, you probably won't want to explore a management role because management gets absolutely no meaningful training. I had 4 different managers in my time at Paytronix. They ranged from being too busy to help with even the simplest question, to being so condescending and unhelpful that I wished they were too busy to check in on me. The attitude boils down to "If you have a problem, it's because you're not working hard enough." Finally, the pay just does not scale with you. After over 2 years of working at Paytronix, and running several of their largest clients, they still listed me as being in an entry-level position to convince me they were paying me fairly. So yes, you'll meet great people and bond with them as you all discuss the toxic workplace you've found yourselves in. You'll be paid a nice starting salary that won't scale with you as you're asked to work more and take on high value clients. You'll gain experience that will be useful when you ultimately regain enough self-worth to decide to leave with everyone else. But no, I cannot recommend working at Paytronix.

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Paytronix Response
5y
As always, we want to thank you (and all others) for your feedback! It is very much appreciated. 2020-21 has been a year of change for the Paytronix Client Services team, and most of this change was not driven by the Pandemic. Most was by driven feedback from the team and new leadership with a new, outside perspective for what a successful, customer-focus team looks like. Some of the changes that have been implemented in the last 18 months include the following: The introduction of new roles on the team: We have added a formal Project Management Office and project managers to the team. We have also created an Onboarding Specialist role to support our customers in preparing for their implementation project. Additionally, we have created a formal technical support team that includes 3 levels of technical support specialists and engineers. We have expanded that team by 3x since it was initially stood up in Q1 2020. We have expanded our Customer Success Manager role, tripling the size of that team in the last 6 months. Lastly, we are hiring our first Configuration Specialist, a new role to support the Solutions Consultants and Customer Success Managers on day-to-day customer requests. The addition of variable compensation plans: We have added a new, variable compensation plan for all roles in Client Services, which is designed to ensure that all team members understand the top priorities of the department and are compensated for their contribution to achieving our goals. Investing in our systems: We have invested heavily in our systems, including overhauling our Case Management system and Salesforce.com, and we are actively working on a new system for managing the implementations processes. With these new systems, we expect that team’s day-to-day work to be streamlined and to provide data to management to ensure we understand capacity constraints and customer data. (“If you can’t measure it, it’s just one person’s opinion,” as the saying goes.) Changing the hiring profile: Some reviews have talked to the fact that Paytronix has done a lot of hiring right out of college, and while we are still dedicated to recruiting and developing this group of candidates, we recognize the need to get outside perspective from experienced professionals to help CS leadership evolve and grow the practice. We have hired more from this new group in 2020-21 than ever before, and we are looking to these professionals to bring their ideas and experience to the table to help us continue to evolve our frameworks and processes and to share their experiences with folks with fewer years of experiences. These changes open the door for new opportunities. No longer is the CS team made up of a single role, Technology Consultant. Today there are 9 different, non-management roles within Client services when, only 12-18 months ago, there was only 1. The team is growing, and adding Team Leads and Managers is one possible growth path for CS team members. We recognize, though, that not everyone is interested in people management, and that is one reason why we have invested so aggressively in the creation of a Career Lattice with different roles across Implementations, Customer Success, and Support. The Lattice provides team members opportunities to develop new skills and specializations as they grow their careers. It also allows each team member to begin to focus on the aspects of the job that excite them the most, rather than having to be all things to all people, as they have been expected to be in the past. At the end of the day, change is hard and takes time. We recognize that not everyone has truly felt the benefits of these changes yet. We know, though, that those who come along for the ride will benefit greatly, and we will benefit from their efforts, too.
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