Dogs Trust Reviews

Well where do I start?! *cracks knuckles* If you suffer with mental health issues, please please avoid working at this charity. Even if you don’t, please do not work here unless you want to be pushed to your limits to beyond breaking point. I have never struggled before, but this role is extremely mentally draining, demanding, repetitive, stressful, and just flat out depressing. If you want to work in a place where you get little to no support, screamed at on the phone every day, work tirelessly to meet stats without any reward, and have your soul sucked clean out, this is the job for you! When I first got the job I imagined a pleasant role where I would be helping people and helping dogs. I thought that it may be challenging at times but that the good would outweigh the bad and it would provide a lot of job satisfaction. What it really is, is sitting on the phone taking the same call day in day out over and over with a sort of script, instead of being able to have genuine conversations. We are there to capture data and be very stiff and robotic on the phones, while also being “yellow and fluffy” and taking all the abuse we get. At the moment, most members of the public who call in are dissatisfied with the company so it’s our job to deal with their complaints and be on damage control for 8 hours a day. The stats are ridiculous. Your calls get recorded and marked and you get marked down for the silliest of things. If you end a call with “thank you, have a nice day” that is not good enough and you will be punished for ending the call that way. You have to say “thank you for your call” and stick to the script like the emotionless robot that you are. I promise you dogs trust, no one is upset that I told them to have a nice day. If you have any input or suggestions for dogs trust, please keep them to yourself. We (the people who actually speak to the public all day every day) get to see what works and what doesn’t, what customers are happy with and what they aren’t. However, the teams chat is a positive space only and any negativity or feedback is greatly unappreciated and will not be taken into consideration. Our job is simply to answer the calls and deal with them as quickly as we can, read the script, lie to the customers if necessary, take their details even if we don’t need them just so that we can capture their data (which apparently is essential for “customer journey”?????) talk at the customer and bombard them with information that they tune out of, end the call, do it all again. Rinse, repeat. Lots of people are leaving the organisation at the moment due to how stressful it is. When you have people being physically ill from the job, you know something is wrong. However, they will completely ignore it and instead of looking after their staff and seeing what they can do to make it easier for everyone, they actually make it harder. Imagine working non stop through the pandemic, being busier than we have ever been, more stressed than we have ever been, working so hard to stay afloat and deal with the constant queue of calls, whilst maintaining stats, dealing with more complaints, having processes changed with little to no warning and having to adapt and remember new rules, working from home, being isolated, and then being told by the manager that we need to “stretch ourselves” and makes the QMS targets harder! I have never felt so undervalued, overworked, mentally exhausted, and uncared for. It really is a slap in the face. Management have no interest in understanding and are void of all empathy. As long as you’re bringing in the data, baby. I do not know how to pack 3 years worth of problems into one post that is short enough for people to stick with and read until the end. There’s so much to say. The organisation has gone downhill since I started and right now it is unbearable. If you’ve made it to the end and you still want to apply for a job at the contact centre, I would say be careful... and have fun in hell.

I have been thinking about this review for a long time, way before I managed to escape to a new job. I want to start off by saying please read and take note of the reviews written. When I first got offered the job I checked and ignored them thinking dogs trust is a big charity so surely they must treat their staff well. This was my first mistake. Dogs Trust is the worst company I have ever worked for. The contact centre management team thrive on bullying and belittling the agents in the role. I have often seen people crying due to comments from management. The agents are overworked and under appreciated. Not just by the contact centre management but the organisation as a whole. We were often told to lie or mislead customer to get their details onto our system. At the end of the day, all they were after was people's data. If someone asked about a dog which we knew had gone we had to pretend we would check just to get their contact details. Your stats are monitored and they are incredibly strict. Even if you were over your talk time by 1 second you were put on a plan and told it was not good enough. This is despite our calls often being emotionally charged (which we are not trained to deal with, such as people threatening suicide). The dogs do not matter at all to the contact centre. They brought them into the office as an incentive for doing the job. Multiple people are off work long term due to mental health issues as a result of the pressure from the management team. You could reach out to a team leader when you're struggling but you would receive no support. The only time team leaders reach out is when you're not meeting your stats, as it reflects poorly on them. The HR policies are outdated and when you are off sick you are questioned when coming back. You are told how it puts pressure on your fellow agents, making you feel guilty for something out of your control. I was off sick for 1 day in December and was called that evening saying they might not pay me if I wasn't in the next day. I needed money for christmas gifts and rent so had to go in, even though I was throwing up that morning. The contact centre is incredibly busy with increasing amounts of abusive calls from the public. Despite this, team leaders have jokey 'management calls' messing about with the filters on zoom whilst we are crying out for help. The rehoming centres also make our life harder by uploading puppies when we are shorter staffed despite being told not too. Once again, the management team do nothing about this to help us. Also they just made our call marking stricter despite how much everyone is struggling. The management team take entertainment from making the job role worse for us. Such as, changing our teams despite promising this wouldn't happen due to how we were already struggling with the constant disruption. They just did it because they can. There is no job progression at all either, I was even told by a member of the management team that it is 'a dead end job' The staff leaving these reviews are not lying nor do we have a vendetta against the company, we have just had enough of the constant mistreatment and under appreciation. We are not just looking for a career change, we are escaping Dogs Trust. I hope that my friends manage to leave this organisation soon and to anyone contemplating this role, please do not take it for the sake of your mental health.