TELUS Reviews in Montreal, QC Area

Pros

For brand recognition and awareness in the population.

Cons

Salaries and work life balance.

Advice to Senior Management

Higher salaries.

Pros

Very good compensation considering no degree required and can get in at a young age. Great benefits regardless of position so long as you're full time.

Cons

Poor management depending on the department. Most managers are not qualified and are promoted based on favoritism. Some great directors and some that are just terrible. Poor shift times and hard to get good shifts without many years experience.

Advice to Senior Management

Students or those with degrees should be offered or shown better direction for opportunities once they have obtained their degree. Some management are in place based solely off of favoritism and many hard workers and those with management qualities are overlooked and stuck moving nowhere.

Pros

Solid corporate strategy, consistent and future-oriented
Excellent products and services
Amazing community and charitable involvement and philanthropy
Lots of opportunity for career development (if you are motivated and consistent)

Cons

Many Corporate silos - though work has been done to reduce it
Internal systems instability and slowness, affecting productivity daily
Quick to implement policy or work changes but slow to support the successful implementation of them - "horse before the cart"

Advice to Senior Management

Please make it a corporate priority to get employee-facing systems to be stable, quick, and easy-to-use, as soon as possible.

Pros

The people who work there (coworkers) are really a great bunch of people. It is too bad management treats tier 1 like dirt.

Cons

The department I work for, is a call center in montreal. It is run by people who used to manage a Telemarketing company and they treat the employees like sweatshop workers. You are chained to your desk.

Advice to Senior Management

Grow up and stop giving promotions to your buddies. Corporate should wipe out most of upper management. They are a clic like in high school. And if you're not a smoker, you can forget about job advancement. Everyone who is upper management got there by talking downstairs with the big wigs during smoke breaks.

Pros

Easy going, informal and fun place to work. Hard work is encouraged and job empowerment is encouraged. The teams are close knit and help each other out as much as they can.

Cons

Salary is not even within departments. Although there are some standardized procedures going on. There can be a big discrepancy in salary within a team for two people doing the exact same job.

Advice to Senior Management

None

Pros

Great team to work with. We have fun everyday.

Cons

there's almost no opportunities to have a career grow in Montreal

Advice to Senior Management

To be more in contact with their employees. The talk about career growth but there is almost none and when there's a posting, htey always outsource.

Pros

trade-union in place, dynamic, well paid, great collegues, good investment on training and user friendly applications

Cons

senior management, anti-union, lack in respect, lack of leadership, sends canadian jobs overseas

Advice to Senior Management

stop sending jobs overseas and have canadian revenus generate canadian taxes, so that you may return properly to the communities you send your products too

Pros

Those with the drive to succeed are handsomely rewarded for their efforts. Lots of recognition and great managers in the call center environment which led to opportunities in other parts of the company. Very competitive compensation package. Great brand.

Cons

No iPhone (yet!) on CDMA network! ;) Call center work isn't for everybody. It's a great starting point to get your foot inside a very good company and move up after paying your dues (1 year) meeting and exceeding KPIs (metrics/stats).

Advice to Senior Management

Never stop caring about your employees. Continue to live by the four values and your future will indeed be friendly.

Pros

A great company for learning new skills about networking.They are ready to bet on you and pay for certifications and courses if you prove you want more.
Good package, overtime paid, shares and more

Cons

This is a big company, still swallowing small ones, so many management changes in management.
Sometimes difficult to progress and understand the objectives of the company

Advice to Senior Management

Nothing bad to say about management, they treat you well if you do the job.They are listening to their people.

Pros

- Best pay out of the Big Three telecom companies (Telus, Rogers, Bell) for frontline call centre positions in Montreal, but only beats the others by $1 to $2 an hour.

- Commissions paid out quarterly based on sales - if you can hit up the customers who call inbound for tech support. Other techs complained, but it wasn't too hard once you got the hang of it - I actually was doing most of my clients a favour, since the services they had were no longer sufficient for their needs and didn't match current industry price points. Yes friends, dial-up is still alive and used every day by tens of thousands, believe it or not - and these people must be liberated! (lol) I made about 1.5 extra paycheques worth of commissions over the course of a year - not bad for a putting out couple of well-timed questions every now and then.

- Bonuses also *may* be paid out yearly, *if* the company as a whole is also performing well.

- Bonuses for consistently meeting or exceeding Key Performance Indicator stats can be made permanent for those who have taken the "mastery" exam for their positions (although it's only about half a dollar more per hour, not much of an incentive to stay in a position which inevitably does become a bit of a mind-number).

- Lots of swag (gift certificates, hats, etc.) given out semi-randomly (have to sell to be part of the prize draw). It's pretty cheap recognition, but it could add up to a free gadget or two a couple times a year and makes the daily grind on the call queue a little less dull.

- Very ergonomic physical environment, feels great to work in. There's even a gym (tiny, but has a decent range of weight-training and aerobic equipment) with showers!

- Nice camaraderie among the frontline grunts on my level, most of my colleagues were also quite well qualified - overqualified, even. Most of the expected "newbie-hazing" from the old-timers was actually good-natured and constructive. Managers were a different breed, however.

- A bit of opportunity for promotion, if you can swing it...See Cons.

Cons

- Like most frontline consumer-facing call centres, it really is modern-day serfdom with a paycheque. Although everything is tracked statistically, it is still quite easy for evaluations to be skewed by subjective assessments, especially from call quality managers.

- HORRIBLE SCHEDULING. As noted by another reviewer, most frontline workers are students or lifers officially on part-time status (whether they work full-time hours or not), and it's hard to understand why they have this nonsensical part-time schedule where you start hours before the sun rises (winter) one week, and then two weeks later start in the early evening. Yes, the part-time schedule cycles down from early morning to early evening shift start times - and back up, a difference of up to 12 hours. Endlessly! This is unless you apply for a "full-time" position which is usually exactly the same job with about the same number of hours, but at least then you're guaranteed a [crappy] schedule of shifts that will begin and end at a consistent time [at midnight, probably] for specified days of the week. Then after some time (2 years, presumably) you can bid for a coveted 9-to-5 full-time tech support schedule. Hey TELUS, there IS life outside the call centre, and it's important, especially to part-timers - otherwise what's the point of working part-time anyway? I'd gladly have taken at least a 10% pay cut just to have more control over my schedule.

- Experience VARIES WIDELY based on who one's "support person" (read: frontline manager/overseer) is. They actually have a lot of control over your career at the company, because their personal opinion of you trumps all when it comes to promotion, no matter how awesome your stats might be. This is scary, because a surprising range of behaviours can be exhibited from these people, from real support and encouragement to abrasive condescension. But hey remember, it really IS their job to breathe down your neck and listen to your calls once in a while (more than that if they don't like you!). Better hope you don't get a bad manager who just enjoys cracking the whip to feed their ego and power trip - that's a guaranteed 4 to 8 hours of telephone misery every work day that no-one can save you from.

- Promotion?! What promotion? Usually that's a transfer to just another department of yet another TELUS call centre. The most outstanding frontline grunts sometimes work the internal help desk for the frontline agents, but rarely are selected as managers. In the end, it seems those who get the promotions are just the odd (and crafty) survivors of the positively horrendous Wireline turnover - some get fired, but many more just quit or grab whatever chance they get to transfer to another department (TELUS Mobility is popular!). By the time I left after a year, over half of the people who were there when my training cohort was new had already gone, and more were fixing to leave.

I did cartwheels when I decided to say goodbye after a year, and still think it was one of the best decisions I've made in recent memory. I wasn't going to waste time busting my rear trying to figure out who to kiss up to for an indefinite number of extra months just so I could get a transfer to a better department. Now, I am FAR more satisfied in my new non-TELUS job.

Advice to Senior Management

Hey TELUS, if you're so concerned about the high costs of employee turnover in your wireline call centres, address the main complaints - terrible scheduling and arbitrary promotion. There IS life outside the call centre, and it's important. I'd probably have taken up to a 10% pay cut just to have more control over my schedule. Cultivate leadership skillls on your own frontline, and then reap the long-term dividends of in-house expertise by hiring from within.