Customer Service Representative - Anonymous employee Fidelity Investments Employee Review

Customer service representative work and culture is truly toxic, mentally taxing, entirely sedentary, and unsettlingly monitored by management. You are physically chained to your desk by a phone set for nine hours a day, and provided with two 15-minute breaks and one 30-minute break, all of which are timed by the tracking system. There's a big sentiment of favoritism that guides promotions, bonuses, and on the flip side - verbal / written warnings. You don't need to be able to think in order to excel in this role, you just need to be able to follow chain of command and avoid questioning anything. Voicing your opinion will always work against you. For anyone who studied finance / econ / business, be warned: this is NOT a finance job in any capacity. You will not learn anything about the financial service industry by being here - unless you move into a licensed role, in which you'll really only be able to learn about the industry to pitch the same handful of Fidelity products that benefit the company, so it's really just a glorified sales role. I work with many people who previously worked in grocery stores, coffee shops, or retail shops, who never went to college. It doesn't matter what you know - if anything, it'll benefit you to avoid all forms of thinking whatsoever, as Fidelity does not value ideas, only obedience. Your schedule is monitored by a system that quantifies every second you spend on / off the phone into performance metrics that determine your fate at the company. Do not drink too much water at your desk. If you take bathroom breaks, it'll harm your metrics and your manager will have to talk to you and possibly issue a warning. Management speaks like they "want to help you", but they really want to help themselves climb the Fidelity ladder, and couldn't care less about their expendable employee base. Pay is very low for a financial services industry job...customer service reps are barely making $38k. And this was after a much-raved about "pay increase" that we should've been so humbled and honored to receive, for the grueling work we struggle through. Coaching sessions are torturous. You'll be placed in a room with your manager and possibly two to three other colleagues, to listen to each others calls, and tear them apart to bits. You are expected to adhere to a call structure and parrot the same lines, check off a certain number of transfers to certain departments, pitch a certain number of "contribution increases" to bring more money to Fidelity at the customer's expense. Managers never tell you what you did well on calls, only what you did poorly. It's not that we don't want feedback and to improve - but sometimes, we did some really nice things on the calls and want to be recognized for our positives too. Minor technicalities are a guaranteed pull down the rabbit hole of warnings. If you have a technical error, the quality team screens more of your calls, notifies your manager, and you get a "verbal warning". They'll screen exponentially more of your calls than they do for anyone else, so that they catch more mistakes you made that everyone else makes too - regardless of how minimal they may be, the repercussions escalate very quickly. Management gets excited to prosecute their employees and never looks at the full situation when quality provides feedback. Half the time, they don't even read their emails or listen to the call, just issue a warning because you "messed up," and they don't care about your side of the story. Sometimes if you try to explain, they'll ask you to stop talking. If you start in a phone center, you will end in a phone center. Before you begin working, management will pitch to you that the "sky's the limit" with career growth in the company, but they don't tell you about the red tape that stands between you and the sky. Fidelity sucks people in for years and years, until they don't have any speakable skills to pitch anywhere outside the company because they've been on the phones for so long, and they're stuck there. It's a culture run by unfair management who talks down to you like you're an incompetent toddler. You will be overworked, underpaid, and undervalued for all the efforts at self-betterment in this job, as it all goes to waste. If they like you, they like you. If they don't, nothing will change that. Either way, get out of there sooner rather than later. The brand name that Fidelity provides isn't worth the mental and emotional suffering of their customer service work.