Support.com Reviews

Current Employee – been working at Support.com full-time for more than a year

Pros – I've been here almost a year, and have enjoyed it. The pay is average, but the benefits are amazing. Co-workers, for the most part, are decent people. Supervisors mostly seem like they truly want to help you.

-Decent Pay
-401k from day 1
-Amazing benefits
-Work from home
-Continued technical growth
-VERY flexible scheduling

Cons – I've heard from some of the longer term people that there has yet to be raises, in years. This is kinda understandable as I believe the company only recently became profitable. The occasional need for required OT kinda sucks, but its also kinda good as it helps the paycheck.

-No employer 401k matching
-No raises yet
-Incentive plans are a bit weak
-Not much communication from the executive staff

Advice to Senior Management – Try talking to your staff more. Come down to our level and listen to us every now and then.

Yes, I would recommend this company to a friend – I'm optimistic about the outlook for this company

Current Employee – been working at Support.com full-time for more than 3 years

Pros – - Work from home
- Benefits (with some cons)
- Pay rate
- Ability to advance when company is expanding
- Ability to work in special projects if you work hard and show interest
- 4x10 shifts
- Shift bids are awarded by performance (and not who is liked more), so the better you perform the better shift you'll get based on your preferences
- Company is always looking to expand, opening new positions for growth - including 3(4) tiers of support
--- Remote Services Technician (Tier 1)
--- Personal Technology Expert (Tier 2)
--- Business Technology Expert (Tier 2, but more knowledgeable regarding the fun stuff)
--- Technical Leads (Tier 3)

Cons – - Customer interactions are at the same level of stress as collections
- Most mistakes are made by other departments which must be fixed by ours
- No face to face contact with co-workers, and no bar to go to after to complain about customers
- Focus for reviews and bonuses are based on hard call metrics and not quality of service
- A lot of unhappy co-workers who don't want to work there anymore but don't have a car to work somewhere else can really bring the general mood of the floor down
- You pay a penalty to insure a spouse if they have insurance available through their own employer
- 4x10 shifts are only available to those who work in states that do not require overtime if you work more than 8 hours in a day
- Quality adherence expectations are very demanding

Advice to Senior Management – Begin giving back to the contact center employees. The ideas currently in place are a start, but they aren't enough.

Yes, I would recommend this company to a friend – I'm optimistic about the outlook for this company

Former Employee – worked at Support.com full-time for less than a year

Pros – Support.com has some sharp employees and your coworkers can be fantastic people to chat with between calls.

•Decent pay, particularly for rural areas
•Work-from-home position cuts out the need for a daily commute and allows you to personalize your space
•Occasionally challenging work can make for a highly enjoyable shift
•Can be acceptable for a temporary job, so long as you don't try to make a career out of it

Cons – Support.com used to be a fantastic place to work for; however, it is now a shell of its former self. The last several months since holiday season 2012 have introduced many changes that made this position a rather unbearable, demeaning experience.

•Shift differentials have been cut, reducing many employees' pay by close to 10%
•The bonus system that management introduced doesn't even give their top 4% of performers the same kind of bonus they would see on a shift differential - it's more of a slap in the face than anything else
•Management has grown far too attached to tracking metrics, which simply does not work in a technical position of this nature. Management cares largely about how fast you get off the phones, and nothing else. Successful upsells, high customer satisfaction, and a fantastic track record for service completion are not rewarded.
•The quality assurance team was outsourced shortly after my departure
•Support.com is hiring employees at a lower pay rate to take care of some of the grunt work, and they're completely shafting their more knowledgeable employees in the process, likely in an attempt to purposely increase churn rate
•Comcast's systems are a complete mess. Prepare to see many customers billed monthly to be told that Comcast has an issue with their equipment and that they can have it replaced. There are rarely refunds for these issues.
•The sales team makes frequent mistakes and technicians are always the ones cleaning up. Sales agents sell improper services, frequently do not properly verify customers, and lie to customers (or simply do not know what it is that they are selling)
•There is a major lack of consistency. One supervisor will do something one way, while another will do it another way. It's easy to get written and verbal warnings for silly reasons.
•While Support.com states it hires within, there really isn't very much room to move up. Supervisors are being assigned larger and larger teams while technical leads (the next "tier" up) have to abide to policy changes that require them to work with significantly more experts at any given time. Meanwhile, both positions seem to be on a hiring freeze...

There are many other frustrations I ran into while working for this company, especially within the last several months that I worked with them. The most knowledgeable and hardest-working employees have almost all left for greener pastures. Many employees have been let go, others have been written up, and several were so frustrated that even some of the best employees left immediately without even submitting a two-week notice.

The stress at this position is unbearable. If you are going to work here, don't try to make a career out of it. It can be semi-decent for a temporary summer job or a position to pick up some extra cash, but beyond that it is a rotten opportunity. Proceed with caution.

Advice to Senior Management – The top-level management is where most of the difficulty stems from. I would recommend that shareholders reevaluate top-level management as a whole and make this the "American" company that the CEO keeps reassuring people that it is. Stop piling more and more work onto everyone. A higher workload isn't bad, especially if it's temporary, but demanding more and more with each passing day while actively telling your employees that you're paying them less is just a cruel move.

No, I would not recommend this company to a friend

Current Employee – been working at Support.com full-time for more than 3 years

Pros – You work from home.
You get health benefits.

Cons – Do not expect to fix challenging problems or really learn anything. You will learn a few procedures to fix common problems and escalate or refund the rest (due to the time it would take for you to fix it being more then an hour) This job is 90% customer service. Being able to smile (or sound like you are happy, technically) to a belligerant, spiteful, terrible person is the true job description.

Stagnant pay. There was one pitiful .25/hr raise 3 years ago that maybe 10% of the employees were eligible for.

Working from home. It starts as a pro, but as you do it more and more it becomes a con. You have no line to separate work from home. You never meet your co-workers. There is no time for 'water cooler' conversation. Your only method of communication is monitered 24/7 by the company. Working from home means that the software on your machine tracks how you spend your time all 8 hours of your shift. If you go over on break for 30 seconds expect to get a torrent of IMs asking where you are. You have to ask permission to use the restroom, to account for the time it takes, or do it in a way that nobody knows you went.

My 4th anniversary at the company I didn't even get an email. I don't think any of us have been here 5 yet the company is so young. Some people report getting water bottles or a cheap wifi mouse as a 3 or 4 year 'bonus'

There used to be a shift differential if you worked night or overnight hours. (A vast majority of shifts are evening/night) They removed that, which equates to a 10% pay cut for most of the employees. It was replaced with a quarterly reward system, where if you are in the top 5% of metrics you get a $200 (taxable) bonus. Which before taxes equates to less then .10/hr over your past 4 months salary. There are lesser bonuses going down to the top 20% I believe, but its just them throwing pennies at you.

Terrible hours. Expect to work weekends and nights. Expect to not have a social life if your friends/family are 9-5ers. I haven't had a weekend off (without using PTO/Vacation time) in 4 years.

Never ending workload. It is a call center. There is constantly a queue. A never ending queue. You will be lucky to get 30 seconds between calls. When the queue is gone, they offer to let engineers leave early so it will return. People basically fight for one of 10 slots to leave early. Employees would rather lose 2-4, sometimes all of thier shift just to not have to work. Having those people leave means the work for you increases if you stay. There is no light at the end of the tunnel, you can't see a goal to reach for the day. Its just a machine constantly throwing piles and piles of work at you for 8 hours, its incredibly demoralizing.

When shift bids happen, approximately 6 months apart. There will be about 50 shifts to choose from. Maybe 3-4 of those will be reasonable for your lifestyle, the rest will uproot you. If you have family commitments, or even a weekly get together with friends, expect to never be able to plan for it again. You will almost certainly be working weekends and/or evening+nights. Since we are 24/7 nationwide, east cost techs have to work till 2am to cover for west coast customers. Expect to re-plan your lifestyle every 6 months.

Since its inception, raises were said to start happening when the corporation turned profit. Some of us toiled away for several years with that as the light at the end of our tunnel. Of course when the time came all we got was a 30 minute video of excuses saying why that couldn't happen. Raises are indefinately delayed.

The customers are horrible. They are some of the most jaded, insecure, and spiteful people I have ever had to deal with. I had better experiences waiting tables and working in a retail store. The only worse interactions I could imagine would be from working a cold call sales or a collections center. Most resent having to pay for tech support. There are loonies, rude people, people you won't be able to understand at all. Many will not be able to follow simple directions. You don't expect them to be computer gurus (that's why they call) but some people will be unable to follow the most simple of directions. Getting some people to find the arrow keys on the keyboard will be a 5 minute task. This would not get on my nerves if it wasnt for your handle time ticking away. Slowly adding up into forcing your next shift being tursday-monday 6pm-230am.

The only thing keeping me here is fear. If I did not fear that not working here would mean having to work minimum wage at some retail store because of the economy, I would have left long ago.

Treat this job as a means to an end. It will never be a career. You are a cog in a machine that is being poorly maintained.

Advice to Senior Management – There is not point. Nobody will listen. I understand they need to turn profits, but they will supress everyone on the corporate ladder to get it done.

No, I would not recommend this company to a friend

Current Employee – been working at Support.com full-time for more than 3 years

Pros – You are working from home, which affords you many options that you would not be able to exercise in a standard office without being judged. After a few months, this will be the only thing you can cling to.

- Work in your underwear
- Hold your head in your hands and think about life decisions that led you to work somewhere like this between each call. Plenty of time for self reflection while you put off answering the next of an endless stream of calls for as long as you can.

Cons – - Management lies about incentives and bonuses for improving performance.
- Management promised raises when we reached profitability then cancelled them.
- Sales force has been fired and outsourced after promising that wouldn't happen.
- They are starting to outsource some of the technical work as well.
- They schedule and reschedule and move people around to stay at the absolute bare minimum service levels agreed to by partners. ( There is always a queue, customers are always upset. )
- You will get yelled at, multiple times a day by customers who have been on hold 1-4 hours.
- You will get yelled at, multiple times a day by customers who were lied to by sales.
- The absolute most soul crushing work experience you will ever have, and this is coming from someone who has worked retail over the holidays a number of times.

Why don't I just quit, you are wondering? I simply don't have the energy any more, I'm too busy dreading logging into work.

Advice to Senior Management – Give us some kind of hope. Raises. Better scheduling. Give back shift differentials. Something. Read the work chat rooms some time, it is very depressing.

No, I would not recommend this company to a friend – I'm not optimistic about the outlook for this company

Current Employee – been working at Support.com full-time for more than a year

Pros – Work from home. Decent pay and benefits. Quite a few knowledgeable technicians and tech leads who you can definitely learn from. Direct supervisors, for the most part, are extremely friendly and helpful.

Cons – ZERO opportunity for advancement. Current focus has frozen the hiring of any additional Personal Technology Experts and instead the hiring of more lower paid Remote Support Technicians. The sales staff is in Manilla and they are an absolute joke. You WILL get yelled at by customers because of somebody else's mistake.

Being contracted out from a 3rd party company that you represent, you are at their mercy when it comes to policy changes. Just got your greeting down to a science, know how to resolve an issue in record time? Too bad, they just changed policy for some inexplicable reason and now you need to do things completely different with NO explanation for the reason for change.

Advice to Senior Management – Just let RJM finally buy you out, dissolve the current company, and move the jobs overseas. It's obviously in the works, and you are stringing along a lot of great people in the process.

No, I would not recommend this company to a friend – I'm not optimistic about the outlook for this company

Former Employee – worked at Support.com full-time for less than a year

Pros – Work at home, some truly caring co-workers and supervisors. Used to be decent pay.

Cons – Constant shuffling of shifts you work, who you answer to, rules and goals change nearly daily.

Promising that if you 'hang in there' you will get a raise. They told their sales people that they were bringing in extra shift help from Bangalore, India. This came after week upon week of demanding and making overtime mandatory /every Day/ for these people. Promises were made to the sales people that no, our jobs would not be outsourced, this was a temporary fix! Instead.. we were stabbed in the back.

Advice to Senior Management – Stop being liars, stop charging for things that you don't actually intend to fix, and stop promoting yourself as a company that only employs people in the US and Canada!

No, I would not recommend this company to a friend – I'm not optimistic about the outlook for this company

Current Employee – been working at Support.com full-time for more than 3 years

Pros – Work from home, can work in pajamas, Supervisors are very professional and do their job properly and can make working here a bit more tolerable

Cons – No room for advancement, Constantly criticized by QA about criteria that is constantly changing, you are NOT there for your technical expertise, you are there to answer call center phones and follow procedure and the allowed time for completing work orders becomes less and less increasing pressure on you. No raises for three years yet the CEO and upper management collect large salaries, stock options and bonuses. One more thing, they offshore offshore offshore. Shift bids are a joke.

Advice to Senior Management – Wake up! Your work force is stressed out, soon you will not find anyone that will work for you. Off-shoring is not the answer either.

No, I would not recommend this company to a friend – I'm not optimistic about the outlook for this company

Former Employee – worked at Support.com full-time

Pros – Decent pay, optional benefits, some decent tech documentation. Nice to be able to work from home.

Cons – Management changes teams all the time. No clear goals or rules about what to offer the customer. For example one manager might tell you to support the customer's manual configuration of their firewall, the next one will tell you that we can't help them.

Advice to Senior Management – Make the responsibilities clear to your workers; it is hard to be effective at your job if you don't know what you are expected to do.

Current Employee – been working at Support.com full-time for more than a year

Pros – The Cons outweigh the Pros, perhaps using the car less and using less fuel would be the Pros.
Working from home would be a Pro, but I would trade it for a employer that treats me better in a second! Looking!

Cons – I simple terms, working for this Company will make you feel: unappreciated, overworked, underpaid, stressed, and demoralized.
There was a time where the focus was to resolve the issue for the Customer (paying for support).
Now, it's all about volume, with not enough time to help customers that are technically challenged.
This is a hostile work environment that only gets worse by the Month.

Advice to Senior Management – It's not worth the effort to give any.

No, I would not recommend this company to a friend – I'm not optimistic about the outlook for this company