Customer Lobby Reviews

Pros

Great pay, fun work environment, you work with interesting and outgoing people, you learn a lot about how to communicate effectively with business owners over the phone

Cons

The work can be exhausting, there is a lot of pressure to stick to the dialogue script that they assign you, which works very well, but takes time to adjust to

Advice to Senior Management

The management at Customer Lobby is spectacular in regards to their sales ability, the one caveat I would bring up is that they don't spend enough time training and developing you because they are very busy with clients. The management would benefit a lot if they spent a bit more time training people on how to read and react to different situations rather than simply throwing you into the fray and push you to learn as you go

Pros

Customer Lobby is a great place to start if you are trying to get your foot in the door into sales. It provides a solid foundation for how to get through to decision makers and how to handle objections. It's a very informal work environment (you can wear casual attire, cuss, and joke around with your co-workers) and the employees are relatively young. The path to promotion from Account Developer to Account Manager doesn't take too long, which is awesome. However, the way in which management communicates (or doesn't communicate) the promotion requirements makes this process quite stressful. Ideally, only a fresh college grad will take this job... someone who doesn't know any better.

Cons

Customer Lobby is a call center. I've worked in multiple inside sales jobs, and this one had by far the strictest standards in terms of dials (calls) and talk time (cumulative duration of all calls during the day). Every day your dials and talk time are recorded and broadcasted to the entire sales floor on the white board, and if you dip below the requirements the management pulls you aside and asks why. The requirements are ridiculously hard, and after 6 months of being here the place starts to feel like a sweatshop. To make matters worse, the path to promotion is super stressful. During my duration at Customer Lobby, I witnessed 6 sales reps (out of the 11 total) go through the promotion process. Each story is the same. The management dangles the promotion in front of your face, promises the promotion if you hit certain standards, and then goes back on the promise and tells you "it's not good timing for the company to promote right now. We are getting top-heavy." I found the communication during the promotion process to be very unprofessional, stressful, and disheartening. I felt that the management pressures reps into high performance, dangling a promotion in front of the reps in order to increase results with no real intention of promotion even if promotion standards are met. Then, even after the promotion, the job doesn't really change that much. The learning curve here is very fast, and you don't really learn much after 3 months in the account developer role, or after 2 months in the account management role. The company is too small to promote anyone to Team Lead, and even then, the team leads do basically the same day-to-day routine as account developers. Reps who aren't immediately successful get the axe within 3 months. For each of the aforementioned reasons, the turnover at Customer Lobby is very high (avg employee stays about 6-9 months, with many employees leaving after 3 months).

Advice to Senior Management

There is some potential for this to be a fun place to work. You need to significantly lower the expectations, as the current standards are clearly unsustainable (particularly talk time and dials). Don't make promises you can't keep. Create contests and prizes to make the office a fun environment (and I'm not talking about lottery tickets for the first person to "get a live trial" -- instead, cough up a pair of A's tickets to the rep with the most closes one week, or give a $100 cash bonus to the first rep to hit quota each period). There are plenty of ways to make the office a better place to work. Also, normal business hours are 9-5, not 8-5. Extend the periods from 2 weeks to a month (this creates a less stressful environment). If you're going to keep the same standards and work environment, my advice is to only hire recent college grads (and I'm talking about fresh graduates who haven't worked full time prior to starting at CL). That way, people will think this is normal work. If you're going to hire people who have already worked in a professional environment, you should consider having tons of contests / prizes with actual incentives rather than the occasional lottery ticket or $10 Trader Joe's gift card. I survived Customer Lobby, but I didn't know any better until I left.

Pros

Casual environment with really nice people. Ability to be nimble and move quickly. Strong leadership from a seasoned entrepreneur. Great product that is ahead of the curve and truly does help small businesses generate more revenue. Working to build a great company that has real value to the community.

Cons

As a bootstrapped start-up, you need to be willing to work hard and contribute to the vision. The company doesn't have resources to carry dead weight of under performers.

Advice to Senior Management

Hire people who can take the company to the next level...people who are excited about the many opportunities ahead. Communicate the vision regularly and get rid of people who are not actively supporting that vision.

Pros

In order to be successful at Customer Lobby, you must work diligently, which instills good work ethic in its employees. Ted is a genius and inspires you to be the best that you can be.

Cons

The work is tedious and repetitive. Some of the problems that arose when I worked there are already being rectified, but at times there was poor communication between management and employees.

Advice to Senior Management

Overall, good job.

Pros

-Ability for promotion and making a decent salary, all based on individual performance
-Pandora plays all day - can get annoying at times, but overall is ok
-People are nice, but not very serious or professional

Cons

-Lack of Organization, solid leadership
-Masquerades as start-up, when is a small business
-Unimpressive product suite
-No fun company parties or outings

Advice to Senior Management

Be less numbers-driven and more people-sensitive. Also, it would be helpful to leave your office and interact more often with the staff rather than staring at a computer screen all day.

Pros

Fun, hip, start-up environment
Great place to start a career in sales
Opportunity for promotion is vast
Everyone is very nice
Skill set learned is very valuable
Progressive discipline model is used, so when numbers aren't met there's an opportunity to reflect on how it can be fixed.

Cons

Very numbers driven, so often times stressful
Lots of different management styles

Advice to Senior Management

Have a more clear cut standard outline for expectations, and leave less to the imagination of the leadership in place.

Pros

Everyone has a voice. Opportunity to make good $ if you put time in

Cons

Not a place for serious, career-driven pros