If you're qualified, look elsewhere... - Support Technician Applied Systems Employee Review

This all pertains primarily to the entry-level support jobs: You are treated like a child, and paid like a burger flipper Extremely poor communication from management down Stressful work environment. High call volume and hold times combine with a shortage of qualified workers to make every day feel insurmountable. Plus, even with call monitoring software on every workstation, in a year and a half I have received over 1700 emails pertaining to the number of calls currently on hold. If employees don't respond to the call volume quickly enough, supervisors will start going cubicle to cubicle to check on technicians and tell them to take a call, even when they have the ability to see who is and isn't on the phone from their desk. We are given 6 hour shifts of taking incoming calls. The other 2 hours per day are meant to callback customers we needed further investigation on. Many of these calls can take up to a half hour or longer, and many techs can end up with 6-10 calls in their personal queue to follow up on. Besides this, we also have to monitor and accept incoming chat support during this time, as well as randomly get assigned priority calls from the group queue. And, if the incoming call volume and/or hold time get too high, we are then told to take more incoming calls, even during these small callback windows we are given. This often leads to a week or longer to resolve an issue that may take a couple of hours total, if we were given the time for it. With a college degree and 6 years of IT experience, I am paid less than someone with a high school diploma and zero experience, working in my same department, who started after I did. I am currently training a new employee who also gets paid more than me. Ask for way more than you think you're worth, and make them talk you down from there. Otherwise, you will get the base salary, regardless of qualification or experience. And your annual raise will barely meet cost of living increases, if that. After requesting a change in my insurance status from HR, it took 4 weeks to get any word back, and I was charged retroactively for all the coverage I didn't capitalize on during that time. When I inquired about not receiving my health insurance card, the head of benefits gave me the 800 number for the insurance company and told me to call them and ask. There is zero incentive to be good at your job. Reviews and raises are practically nonexistent. Whether you constantly exceed the company goals, or you skate by doing the bare minimum, you will likely get similar results at your annual review. When the CEO comes to the office to do "company-wide meetings", the Support department is required to stay in their cubicles and continue to work. We are told to watch the video of the address after the fact, but are never given time off the phones to do so. Initial training for new techs is overwhelming, and unhelpful. They go 10 miles wide and a half an inch deep, so when you hit the floor, you are usually completely lost. The company constantly pats itself on the back for record profits, business acquisitions, and surpassing Sales and Retention goals, yet none of this trickles down to the employees. Development, Sales, HR, etc all get hour lunches, while Support gets a half an hour. When I inquired management about this they said "Well, you could always stay an extra half hour and take an hour lunch." 1. No, I am not allowed to do this because of the micro-management of scheduling. 2. I carpool with a Development employee who works the same hours I do, and he gets an hour lunch. Signs all around the building claim that "Support leads the way" and that we are "The industry's best Support." Yet we are the lowest paid, highest stress position in the company (outside of perhaps upper management). When I inquired about performance and experience compensation raises, I was told "Why don't you go to such and such other department? They make more." I have zero training in that department. I constantly exceed the company goals for support quality, I am knowledgable about what I currently do, and the only way to get a decent raise is to go to a department that doesn't necessarily match my skill set or expertise? Even management who have been with the company for 20+ years are typically making the same a decent employee would after 3-5 years in most tech companies. The software itself... It is horrifically outdated and broken. We actively support all 15 versions of our primary software, not including maintenance updates and patches. Plenty of customers are running software 4 or 5 versions old. And only on the most recent version do we even begin to support Windows 8, Office 2013, etc. System-breaking errors can occur from misplaced characters in databases. Common workflow errors will be written-off as version specific, and when the customer updates, the error still occurs.