The training program is easily one of the most rushed and unhelpful programs I've ever seen. I and many others in my class felt woefully unprepared to do our work when we began taking calls. Many of us did not receive hands-on training in an actual work setting, nor did we have the dedicated leaders during our nesting weekend that we were promised.
The much bigger issue is that as a company whose job is to dispatch automotive-service providers for AT&T members enrolled in that company's roadside-assistance program, our AT&T client's terms and conditions (which you can read online by Googling "ATT roadside assistance" and looking for the 2015 version of the PDF, which is not a long document) imply that customers will receive a much larger benefit than they actually do. There is no circumstance where our computer systems are actually designed to pay out a $75 benefit--for many services, it will pay out less than half of that--and customers who actually read their terms and conditions and are "in the know" with regard to how much they are entitled to will still not get the full extent of their benefits, because there is a programming error that will not physically allow us to provide that level of coverage even with manager approval. Speaking of software and equipment failures, our phone software often "sticks" and ends up resulting in calls timing out since our on-screen answer keys don't always work, and there's new mechanical alternative to ensure that we can answer calls properly without restarting or switching computers, which also messes up our schedule adherence. On a lesser note, the ten-minute breaks would be more tolerable if the bathrooms didn't take 90 seconds both ways to walk to, and that's if you walk fast like I do.
AT&T explicitly asks us to dodge members' questions of how much they are covered for, and to refer them to their terms and conditions--which are inaccurate. In other words, you have to lie in order to do your job at almost the basic level, and opinions are divided as to whether even service providers are allowed to know how much a member is covered for, which makes bill splitting and out-of-pocket cost agreement a nightmare. Your job process is one of trial and error, in which you will often call well upward of a dozen automotive-service providers in order to find someone with a reasonable service rate and ETA who isn't too busy to help in the first place, which amplifies frustration for many customers who are kept waiting while you are doing everything you can to help them. It is likely that you will have at least one customer, sometimes in tears, threaten to cancel their roadside assistance nearly every single day, and you won't be able to blame them or yourself. The likability of the management staff depends very widely on who you are dealing with and what position you are in. The computers are so low-end that they sometimes freeze just from having multiple browser tabs open, and the phone system is prone to dropping calls, which agents sometimes get unfairly blamed for, as if they're purposely avoiding calls. This is both a pro and a con, but call volume seems to be steadily decreasing, which is a pain for agents who like to be busy. In the bigger picture, however, this could be an omen of possible cutbacks and layoffs to come. I had been told that Allied was a great place to work, but that may have been before they started trying to massively expand so quickly. It's way out of control now, and employee absenteeism and work ethic are apparently not their best here. On a small note, it would be nice to get paid every week instead of only twice a month.
