- The very nature of this position makes it difficult for a lot of people to work, and most people leave the role within their first 6 months. This is because, from the customer perspective, you take the role of a quotes agent -- being the only way a customer can get pricing for their move, as the website intentionally doesn't display the price to force them to call in -- while your role is to get them to commit to buying/reserving the move. This causes a clash between customer expectations and the expectations the organization has for your job, and many customers get angry that you're trying to rush them to committing to what is often a multi-thousand-dollar purchase. It feels like you're a cars salesman, but you have to bait-and-switch the customer into purchasing the car when they just want to know the price because it's being intentionally kept from them by the company website.
- Mandatory overtime for 6 months of the year. While you do receive overtime pay, this means that -- because you lunch break does not factor into your time worked -- your shifts in the summer months span 9 and a half to 10 hours. New hires are often scheduled for evening shifts, which end as late as 10pm. This is owing to the headquarters for this national company being on the east coast, meaning that what is 5-7pm for the west coast is 8-10pm for the HQ office.
- No summer holidays. You are given overtime pay for working those days, but you are required to work as scheduled on Labor Day, Memorial Day, and 4th of July.
- The longer you spend in the position, the more is heaped onto your role. The training is competent and make the position seem simple, but then they keep adding call types. This includes an autodialer that will force you onto outbound dialers you didn't directly make, despite the role being advertised as an inbound sales position.
- Constantly changing commission structure. While the broad strokes stay similar, the metrics are constantly being adjusted -- and usually raised to be more difficult -- for what percentage of commission they pay you. While they don't "steal your commission" as some other reviews claim, they do have extremely high standards for paying you your full commission, including conversion percentages, ready time, clock in and clock out times, etc. These get exhausting to keep up with, and many "average employees" see their commission decline as they burn out and have trouble keeping up with these standards.
- An obsessive focus on talk time and availability to take calls. This is an inbound call position, so it is understandable that they want you available to take calls, but in recent months, there has been an increased fixation on ensuring employees keep their phones on as much as possible -- even if they're doing critical follow-up work to notate a move or reach out to a client, which forces you to get pulled into any call, especially the outbound dialer, with no notice. There are many days where your shift is call after call within 30 seconds of one another, giving you no time to recover. If they could have you talking on the phone for literally your entire shift, they would jump at the opportunity, and when the shifts are 9 to 10 hours, it's extremely draining.
- Rather stingy call center staffing and operations. Obviously, they do a lot of hiring over the summer months to try to alleviate the increased call demand, but generally the staff they keep does not reliably meet the demands for the number of people calling in, regardless of department. This makes the position feel like a fire fighter putting out flames as people flood the call lines and there's not enough other staff members to accommodate them. While I've worked on the inbound sales team, this problem is even worse for the service team.
- Furthermore, to add to the above point, there doesn't seem to be any investment into improving the quoting and scheduling systems to accommodate the increased call volume and the system goes down due to overwhelming traffic on a near-weekly basis. Similarly, the company does not seem to have any plans to expand their call center nationally to alleviate the east coast needing to work so late, despite many similarly-sized companies I've worked for deploying a fleet of remote call center workers or having multiple smaller centers across the country.
- Much higher role of luck than other sales positions I've worked. Because it's an inbound position and calls are largely first-come, first-served, there is no control over your leads, and you can have days where you have multiple bad leads back-to-back (e.g. people with unreasonably low budgets, rude customers, people that are too far away from our hubs to service, people not moving for another year) that end up tanking your numbers.
- Key success metric is conversion -- calls taken vs orders booked -- which is a lot more easily negatively impacted than positively. This is because calls where an order books take longer to finish than calls where an order doesn't book. On the average very good day, I take about 10 calls, whereas on the average very bad day, I take about 20 calls. This means you constantly have to fight these shorter bad calls, while the good ones can't make up nearly as much ground for you.
- Yearly "restructuring" where they take the lowest performing sales representatives off the sales floor and force them to take service calls. Remember, service has even more call volume issues than sales, which means your day will be spent with a nonstop torrent of disgruntled customers. While you can claw your way back to sales, you have the constant pressure of getting cut to service looming over you. There is also the unspoken understanding that the reason they "cut" you into the service team is to try to get you to quit of your own volition rather than them having to fire you and pay some form of unemployment or severance.
- All of the above compounds into little in the way of work life balance. Over the summer months, especially working an evening shift, a lot of the days become "wake up, go to work, get home, it's too late to do anything significant out of the office, go to bed, wake up the next day, go to work..." and so on. While, generally, the management and employees on an individual level are very understanding of hardships and the stress of the position, the overall system and role leads to rapid and massive burnout with no real break, which then ends up slaughtering your commission as you struggle to meet the talk time/ready time and conversion expectations. This leads to a snowballing effect that causes a lot of reps to no longer feel the position is worth working, and why there is so much turnover.