CenturyTel Reviews

Pros

Good benefits and pay with union representation

Cons

Micromanaged to death with changes in what is wanted so fast its hard to keep it all straight

Advice to Senior Management

Stop micromanaging. Allow us to take time with customers to keep them happy and coming back instead of hating the company and changing.

Pros

Salary and benefits are still very good.
Glen Post and Karen Puckett are excellent at what they do and are deserving of our confidence.

Cons

The mergers have been managed badly as far as lower level employees are concerned.
 Legacy employees have been stripped of their knowledge and job tasks and given nothing in return for their dedication and help.
Control, and job tasks, during these mergers, have been decided by manipulation and cronyism. Internal power struggles abound.
Upper management has allowed legacy employees to be badly-used by control seeking managers from mergers.
Too many middle managers and project managers are causing a micro-managed environment.
Processes are being developed that promote cronyism and power transfers instead of efficiency and productivity.

Advice to Senior Management

No reason to provide advice. Management is no longer listening.

Pros

Benefits package is decent. They have good health insurance: medical, dental, pharmacy, mental health (you will need that one if you work here for any length of time), and vision. They do pay for continuing education.

Cons

Extremely stressful environment mostly due to how the company is run. Company great at first then they showed their true colors. Managers kept busy in meetings all day so those of us taking calls have very little support. We mostly rely on our peers who are also busy taking calls. Rapid changes after merger with Qwest. Expected to do much more in less time. Customer service has been greatly sacrificed in the process. Systems are antiquated. The supports are not in place to do what's expected. They seem to have gotten the cart before the horse. Morale has dropped way down since Centurylink took over. Upper management doesn't seem to care. Several of my coworkers have had to take short term disability due to the stress.

Advice to Senior Management

Take a good, hard look at those Unifying Principles and start following them...especially the 1st one! Stop micromanaging! Start encouraging! You will get way more out of your employees and they will be much happier if you relax a bit on the requirements. You need to be much more supportive than you are. You need to put supports in place so employees can do their jobs: better systems, NOHD, management who is available instead of in meetings all day. Until these are in place, metrics such as AHT need to be relaxed. You have given us more to do and less time to do it in. Customers and your employees need to come first again. This job is hard enough. You need to alleviate the stress of your employees, not add to it.

Pros

Immediate Manager allows extreme flexibility with work hours.

Cons

Operationally deficient due to lack of integration from M&A activity

Advice to Senior Management

Make a HUGE effort to show you value your employees...your biggest asset. Live the CenturyLink Unifying Principles...especially fairness. Pay your sales people for the sales they make rather than fighting them for every dime. If you pay them, they will produce.

Pros

They are very good about allowing you time off when you need it, because they make the schedule a month in advance. Most people were very friendly to work with. You may get to see parts of the shows/concerts for free as you are always there with the crowd. You get free Cappuccino.

Cons

Many people that work there have been working there for many years and they think they know everything that there is to know, so they are very resistant to young, new faces. The pay is sub~par!!
Aside from people watching, it was a very boring job, you mostly just stand around and wait for people to clear the rooms. You stand on your feet for several hours at a time.

Advice to Senior Management

Do not treat the employees like children, they are capable of accomplishing adult tasks.

Pros

pay was ok for local; benes were very good
bonuses for performance were good
nice people - mostly always helpful

Cons

strict regimented hourly schedule - zero chance to be flexible
got sick -- needed a doctors note - and it didnt matter anyway - still got written up

Advice to Senior Management

main thing would be to implement some form of "hour banking" - allow some flexibility
dont push selling soooo much

Pros

Great company to climb in the management chain. Great benefits

Cons

You may get burned out

Pros

Raise of over 6 dollars an hour in less than 2 years due to new position opening up (Occupational). Very good benefits, and 5000 a year for college that's not required to be work related. About 3 weeks in paid time off after a couple of years. 401K match, Pension vested after only 5 years. For the most part the coworkers that survive are reasonably intelligent and good people. After this job every other job would be cake.

Cons

After doing this job every other job would be cake. Very stressful position, basically 3 jobs in one, general customer service & billing questions, collections, and sales. Sales and collections are diametrically opposed psychologically speaking. Management style is micro, even if you are meeting monthly objectives seems like they are building a case to fire you rather than coach you. Ob Form for a call that is supposed to be 430 seconds or less has 16 or 17 items that are required. Spend a lot of time cleaning up and explaining accounts that other reps or vendors have fouled up. Centurylink not hiring for same position, appears to want to reduce staff.

Advice to Senior Management

If you want people to succeed at a position the best philosophy is to keep it simple. Also if somebody is meeting their numbers and are acting ethically, leave them alone. You need coaching and behavior modification if you are not meeting the metrics, not if you are. I just hope CenturyLink did not bite off more than it can chew, Qwest is not exactly an easy company to manage much less integrate.

Pros

Paid training, legit company, work at home opportunity, semi flexible hours, part time hours, company supplied headset and phone, bonuses paid out for sales performance.

Cons

This position was to be temporary for 3 months but I have been with the company for a year and I am still a temporary employee. I was told I would get an employee discount but they are not allowing us to have this discount blaming it on different things. This is also a pure sales position, even though callers reach this position for billing questions or account issues reps are required to offer three sales before they can resolve issues. You must meet a quota and many reps cheat customers and are encouraged to do so by management.

Advice to Senior Management

If you attend a meeting with leads and management two days in a row you will get two sets of information. Leads and management encourage new hires to sell customers items they do not need to make sales rather than trying to be customer service oriented. There are only about 6 of 50 of my original co-workers that are still around from the beginning due to this. If I did not need this job I would quit as well due to ethical issues.

Pros

Benefits were great but once more than one employee utilized the tuition reimbursement opportunity they changed the polocy so that noone in this division were eligable.

Cons

the corporate office has kept the salaries intentionally low with lies of possible raises every year. they allso have prevented anyone from ever posting out of this division for growtih opportunities . Moral is low and the corporate office treats them as though they are subhuman.

Advice to Senior Management

Corporat office has allowed the senior management to become almost godlike.