Company: Apple
Date: 2016-12-13
Overall rating: 2/5
Employment status: former

At-Home Chat Advisor
Pros: -No commute
-Decent benefits
-Work from home
Cons: -Too driven by numbers and not the end result.
-False promises.
-Horrible scheduling issues. - moved half the staff to iTunes then kept them there after they told them they would be coming back leaving the chat department under water for MONTHS! 
-Depending on your boss, there is alot of micro managing. My boss was pretty cool but i heard otherwise from co-workers. 
-Taking 3 chats at a time for tech support is just too much. It's doable sometimes but when they were slammed for those few months that drove me to quit, it was busy with 3 chats+ all day for 10 hours and most everyone was upset because they had to wait, etc etc etc. 
-There are different rules and procedures based on the country the customer is in, causing confusion because previous reps never verified the customer location and they would get upset when they were offered an option that they did not qualify for because they live in the wrong country. 
-During that busy time, they kept telling us that they were going to fix the scheduling issues, but instead they purposely let people go home on VTO so the reps who stuck it out, were stuck on 3 chats all day just to save some money. 
-No dispute process for unfair survey scores. 
-Development was not taken seriously in my opinion. Many of my chats were reviewed but I was never given any constructive feedback on the surveys that fell under and was told I did everything I could. Well if I did what I could then there should be a process to turn over that survey as it was out of my control and providing a feedback link does nothing for the customer.
-Previous supervisor reviews, wouldn't fully read my chats and just assume that I did not meet my commitments. I had to constantly read through all my reviews and submit corrections because they were being missed for not having enough time to go over my chats. If you don't have time for a rep's performance improvement and development, how the heck are you expecting them to improve? 
-During that busy time (which they said would only last a few weeks, turned into months) this was not even during a launch period. meetings and trainings that were required were being canceled but somehow we were expected to complete them while being on 3+ chats at a time. 
-They wanted reps to go above and beyond but with it being so busy there was literally almost no time to stand out unless you had 4 hands. I had to do many of my extra projects and presentation preps during my breaks/lunches and off time because the environment was too busy and stressful during scheduled work time. 
-Systems didn't work properly all the time and were poorly structured. My last job literally had one hub that we would go to for troubleshooting and then go from there. Apple wants to be different and have 1000's of articles that we have to search find through quickly when many of them had too many steps that didn't fix the issue causing a poor customer experience. I ended up using google for 90% of my research and I had better luck fixing issues then using their internal systems.