Pros
Good way to gain knowledge of stock market, if you're interested. I happened to have an excellent manager, but plenty of others there would give no support if you were in their team.
Cons
The company has grown quickly over the last couple of years but did not put in place the infrastructure to deal with the influx of new customers before they came. The back office are constantly behind in their workflow, but it's not their fault, they don't have the staff to keep up. They can be reluctant to help those in customer service, and it feels like there is a culture of looking down on customer service reps. Some reps were moved to temporary back office roles in order to support the overloaded departments, but despite doing well with the work they were not allowed to move across permanently, and it feels very difficult to move into another area of the company, or feel like there is any opportunity for career progression. Management constantly bring in new changes to try and improve things, but these changes are not well thought through, and they are slow to change things back or change things again when it is clear that something isn't working. Compared to my new place of work the management here do not look after their employees at all. If you take a day off sick you're interrogated about when you'll be back in the office. Toilet breaks are monitored to the second. There is no trust and no feeling of respect. Employees are constantly hounded regarding their targets, and everyone was always stressed. Despite the vast amount of technical knowledge required for the role the company do not make any effort to actually retain staff. Nor is there an appropriate financial reward for building up that knowledge over time. Staff are rewarded only when they hit targets such as low call times and number of contacts, building a culture of bad customer service as everyone is rushing to get off the phone to keep their average handling time low. If a member of staff has low handling times they are rewarded with a bonus, which is taken away should they make a mistake, creating a culture of fear and punishment when research shows that positive reinforcement is a far better way to encourage growth and good behaviour. Reps are also expected to know everything, and do not have the opportunity to specialise in one area of the business. This is something that would greatly benefit ii's customers, and the staff themselves, but ii are so scared of having any calls queuing that they would rather give a below average service so that the phones are answered quickly, than make sure the reps are able to competently handle queries. For a company who want to drive their customers online, they have not put in place the IT or web development infrastructure to support this, and as a rep you are constantly fielding queries from unhappy customers about various problems with the website/app and why these are down.
