Unappreciated and Undervalued - Anonymous employee Rakuten Employee Review

2.0
Jun 9, 2017
Anonymous employee
Recommend
CEO approval
Business Outlook

Pros

1) Nice new office space in Central London 2) Free breakfast on Wednesday's and free lunch on Fridays 3) Drink share on Friday's starting at 4pm

Cons

1) Training isn’t in person and you listen to audio recordings of what you need to know. This doesn’t work well at all as people have different ways of learning and absorbing information. There is no there to guide as well and show you personally the step by step process of things and in the end it’s just noise and information overload. 2) Senior/Upper management are not at all people persons. They don't know how to manage their employees on an individual persona basis to cater to each individual’s needs and personality. They also aren't approachable should you want to go up to them and ask them for help or advice. They will tell you to figure it out on your own and then blame you when you come to the wrong conclusion. They don’t motivate you or empower you to do well, nor do they tell you what you’re doing right and just tell you constantly what you are doing wrong but won’t give any feedback what’s so ever on what to or how to improve. Simply put, management really lack management experience. 3) They say they want you to have a work life balance and provide flexi hours but for the Complete Affiliate team, Account Managers and upper management come in at 8am and leave past 6pm, and makes you feel bad if you come in at 9am and leave exactly at 6pm. 4) There are an abundance of mandatory meetings that take up an incredible amount of your time and majority of them aren’t relevant to the teams or UK market (team meetings, 1-2-1 meetings, all company meetings, affiliate meetings).You aren’t allowed to miss them even if you have important and more pressing work to finish i.e. an account review. On top of that management blames you for not having time management skills when there is literally not time do anything due to the meetings and the numerous accounts you handle. Which leads me to my next point... 5) Distribution of accounts is incredibly uneven. You can have one Account Manager managing 12 accounts and another one just managing 6. When you bring this up to management they tell you that you just have to deal with. Not only is the distribution of accounts uneven, the workload between Account Coordinators is even more so uneven where you will have a set of 5 coordinators but only one (1) MAYBE two (2) picking up the work. 6) They switch Account Managers around so often that a client can start with one Account Manager at the start of the year, and towards the end have another one due to just shuffling of accounts. 7) Extremely high turnover rate, 2017 alone there have been 7 people who have left the Affiliate Complete team. One client account is already on its third (3rd) Account Manager for the year due to two (2) of its Account Managers leaving the company. 8) There is no motivation for you to succeed or progress in this company. They say they hire within first, however during my time here every time an Account Manager has left, they have hired outside personnel instead of promoting those within who actually put a lot of work in and deserve that promotion. Then these people they hire lack Affiliate Management experience. 9) Low pay (under the industry average) for the amount of work you put in.

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Mar 25, 2026
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Pros

Rakuten Rewards has great life balance. Too bad the economy was getting rocked.

Cons

Don't really have any cons. I understand that the market's been hard so had to downsize the force, so that was kinda challenging. Hopefully AI will increase everyone's output.

4.0
Jun 22, 2026
Recommend
CEO approval
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Pros

Flexible Hours, Benefits, Pay, lunch provided 3 days per week,

Cons

There were no cons while I was there

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