RockAuto Reviews

Our own little bit of North Korea in Madison, replete with a personality cult surrounding the management. It's an environment where public shaming is the norm and where coworker is pitted against coworker. For example, every three months, each employee is subject to a peer performance review where any other employee is encouraged to anonymously criticize said employee. The peer review is conducted just prior to the issuing of the quarterly bonus and an employee who receives a greater number of negative reviews receives a smaller share of the bonus. The legitimacy of the criticism is never questioned by management and is treated as gospel in spite of the fact that groups of coworkers will act as a cabal to deny an less popular employee an honest share of the bonus. Management publicly posts a graph showing each individual's daily sales and first call resolution performance which sounds reasonable until one considers that RockAuto employees are discouraged from making direct sales. The sales are calculated using a complex formula involving data derived indirectly from a transaction record, information which isn't available to the employee being evaluated. The First Call Resolution FCR) is a bit more direct but the data is equally obscure. If a RockAuto agent receives a call or email and notes the conversation in the transaction record, then the customer calls back with a comment or question and reaches another agent, the initial contact receives a demerit. The management believes every problem can and must be resolved in a single contact. Unfortunately, as a RockAuto agent, you will have little control over whether the customer contacts RockAuto a second time. A high FCR score over a three month period will result in termination and RockAuto has lost many excellent employees because of this. Some agents find it more prudent to simply avoid adding notes to the transaction record; you will be reprimanded but you won't necessarily be fired. And, when an employee is fired, there is no announcement. The employee's name and extension disappear from the contact record and current employees avoid mentioning him or her. This results in a weird situation where customers call to speak with a specific employee and the agent only realizes that employee was fired when their extension no longer exists. Because employees with a greater number of customer contacts will naturally have a lower FCR score than employees who answer fewer calls and/or emails, terminations are commonplace, which is why RockAuto is always hiring. If you accept a position here, you will always worry that a series of bad peer reviews or a low sales or FCR score will result in you losing your job and, as in my case, more than a decade of loyal service mean nothing. The employee manual spells out the proper procedure for handling most situations which arise however, the manual changes daily and the procedures change constantly. In fact, there is a staff dedicated to changing the manual so no rule is constant and the way a problem was handled last week is handled entirely differently this week. As a Supply Chain Manager, you will be responsible for the shipping performance of a warehouse halfway across the country. RockAuto doesn't own the warehouse (or any warehouses, for that matter) and the staff of the warehouse is often indifferent to your concerns. If your warehouse(s) fail to live up to the performance standard set by management, it isn't unusual to be publicly chastised in the middle of the open office and this rebuke will be so loud that other agents will have trouble hearing customers on the phone. This admonishment has reduced some employees to tears and caused others to simply walk out. If you're the least bit sensitive, avoid RockAuto. The RockAuto online catalog is rife with application errors so there is a constant stream of angry customers calling because they received the wrong part. As a customer service agent, you will be expected to defend the veracity of the catalog and convince the customer that they ordered incorrectly. RockAuto ships using some untrackable methods and you will be expected to placate the customer who's order is late and can't be tracked. If you make an assumption that the order is lost or didn't ship (which happens surprisingly often) and you reship the order, you could be reprimanded. You will be asked by management to make judgement calls, but faulted when you do so. In essence, there is no positive reinforcement at RockAuto: it's all stick and no carrot. Everything you do is monitored and management stresses what they perceive to be your weakest skills to review. As an employee, you will never hear management utter the words "good job", but you will here "what were you thinking???" and "that's not the way you should have handled that" on a daily basis. Management uses the threat of termination to keep employees in line and, as a result, moral is the lowest of any other place I've worked.

-If you are "lucky enough" to be hired as an SCM, you first have to make it through an ever-changing set of "standards", which have nothing to do with the work that you will actually be doing. Countless new hires do not make it through this process, and are let go within weeks of starting (even if they relocated specifically for this job). -IF (it's in all caps, because it is a very big "if") you make it through the SCM training process, you will then be tasked with creating a dependency chart. For those who are not familiar with what that is, it is essentially a map of steps that need to be taken, in order to achieve the desired result. In theory (and in reality, at many other companies in different industries), they are a great idea. In practice, at RockAuto, they are meaningless documents that are ever-changing, due to suppliers' fluctuating schedules (and perhaps, not even being interested or capable of taking on the "project" at hand, at the time). As a result, SCMs spend countless hours merely updating wording and dates on their dependency charts to appease teamleads and the company’s owner, rather than actually working with their suppliers on things that impact the company’s bottom line. -The fun part with dependency charts comes each month (it was previously every week!), when you submit monthly “goals”. Per Merriam Webster, a goal is “the end toward which effort is directed”. The problem is that at RockAuto, whatever “goals” you set for yourself each month absolutely must be completed 100% by the next monthly meeting (or you face being berated by the owner of the company and whichever hapless teamlead you report to). The RockAuto definition of a goal results in minimal motivation for Supply Chain Managers to set actual goals for themselves that may be slightly out of reach for a one month timeframe, and leads to grasping for the easiest goals that they are certain they can accomplish in a month. This means that countless innovative, useful and profitable ideas are never actually taken on, because they cannot be accomplished in a month. -None of the teamleads are actually leaders, or halfway decent at managing a team of people. This is evidenced by the near-constant micromanagement, subtle threats against the future of your job, as well as countless snobby (sometimes, downright rude) emails about something that the company’s owner didn’t understand or changed his mind/forgot about, so he threw a fit. Your teamlead will not give all of the facts to the owner of the company in their monthly meeting, and will throw you under the bus to protect their own jobs and avoid further conflict with the owner of the company. As a result, the owner of the company does not have any idea what his SCMs are actually doing, because teamleads selectively share information (and do not step in to correct him on anything, when he begins going on a tangent about something relating to one of your suppliers). -Countless talented and intelligent individuals have been demoted from the SCM position, despite being at the top pay rate (meeting all of the pre-defined "standards"). Unless you are in the select group of untouchable people (most of whom have zero relevant education to be in the positions they're in), rest assured that you will eventually be demoted. -Sexism is alive and well at RockAuto, but not in the traditional sense. The owner of the company makes it a point to surround himself with females. All supply chain teamleads are females, all product managers are females, and all but one of the marketing department are females… If you are a male and hoping to get promoted to a different department, it simply will not happen. -RockAuto does not own any of its suppliers. However, they are a very large customer for many. As a result, suppliers are often willing to listen to process improvements that RockAuto proposes to an extent. The problem is that management at RockAuto (read: teamleads and company owner) think that they inherently know what is best for all suppliers, despite never having actually worked in a warehouse environment in their lives. There is also constant conflicting information between pushing a supplier to do a specific thing, and negotiating with the supplier. Some teamleads insist on having their teammates’ suppliers do specific things, without actually thinking about what they’re asking. Other teamleads say things to the effect of “there is no RockAuto way,” and seem to encourage you to negotiate with the supplier. Where the owner of the company lies on that spectrum is unclear and ever changing, and is as predictable as which way the wind will blow from one day to the next. -Nobody in the Product Management department is actually familiar with cars or working on them. As a result, many growth opportunities are overlooked. -The owner of the company has countless philosophical arguments that limit the growth of the company. -They are a non-essential company that is exploiting the vagueness of what constitutes an “essential business” during the Covid-19 crisis. Nobody is allowed to work from home. -Writing a Glassdoor review for RockAuto is the closest you will come to having an HR department to air grievances to while working at RockAuto (seriously, there is no HR department).