Granted, it has been some time since I worked there (this review was originally typed up and posted in 2022 but mysteriously it was removed, how odd!) but I am going to stick with what I originally posted.
Once your training is up, you are dumped to the wolves. By wolves, of course, I mean the customers. No one is calling into a call center because they are happy, obviously, but the level of vitriolic hatred I was exposed to on a daily basis is something I've never witnessed anywhere else. Constant screaming, swearing, and threats were the norm. I can't even blame the clients, they're getting a sub-par product sold to them by deceitful salespeople.
I can't count how many times I spoke with clients who had been told they'd never be charged for their service, only to have the full price kick in three months after the date of sale. By the time they notice, the salesperson has already moved on to another company. Now you're stuck with a furious customer and zero support on how to help them. Want to offer them a refund? Good luck getting management to agree to that. Maybe you can give them a discount on future billing, but of course they just want to cancel.
Need help with a call? Need a supervisor because a client is escalating? Enjoy sitting on hold for 15/20 minutes to get ahold of someone. Half of the managers there have zero interest in helping you, and the other half are legitimately too busy to help you. So now you've got a client who sat on hold for 30/40 minutes just to get to you, that you now have to put on hold for another 15/20 minutes just to hope a supervisor is even available to assist them.
It is miserable work, you will constantly be screamed at and abused verbally by the irate customer base. The stress and misery of knowing that there are 150 callers waiting in queue, all of whom have been lied to or mistreated in some way cannot be overstated.
That's just the joys of the phone queue, I haven't even gotten to the disorganization yet! No one seems to know where to route the calls. Remember when I said they'll hire you right off the street? This is the flip side of that coin. Half of the people taking calls just want to get rid of them as quickly as possible, so they'll route them somewhere else without bothering to determine where they should actually go. Now the client bounces around again and again until they get to someone who actually wants to do their job. Even if you can't help them, the client won't get off the phone because they assume (fairly) that you're just another cog in a machine that doesn't want to turn. So now you have to put them on hold, and frantically message other departments to try and get them to help. But of course, they're all too busy to do anything.
Most of my calls were people who had already been assured that their problems were solved, when in reality they hadn't been addressed at all. Phone reps would take the call, tell them some nonsense about how they'd handle it, then do literally nothing and just let the situation get worse. Go check the reviews from clients, you'll see what I'm talking about. So when time goes by and the client still has the same issue, they call and wait in the queue (again) until they get to someone who will actually help them. Then the fun begins, because now you've got this project to take care of while also constantly taking incoming calls. You've got to babysit the project through every department it ends up with, checking constantly every day to make sure it's being worked on. Sometimes other departments will just close the project because they have too many open projects as it is, so then you need to submit a new project, which bumps out the timeline again.
On top of this, the call expectations from management are impossible to achieve while providing anything resembling good service. The queues are constantly overflowing with calls, so you have zero time to get anything done during the day. Somehow though you are expected to manage your projects and take calls and make your notations on said calls with almost no wrap-up time between calls. Upper management only wants to see that a large number of calls are being taken, they do not care if customer problems are resolved. In order to make your call quotas for the day, you would need to blast through security verification, listen for 1 or 2 minutes while the client complains, then assure them you'll fix it before hanging up and doing nothing about it. Rinse and repeat. That's what upper management wants.
Obviously the correct solution to this would be to actually solve the problems the clients have, so that they aren't calling 5/6 times about the same issue. But of course when you suggest that to management it is tossed in the trash. They always said that we deserve to be heard and that our input is important, but shockingly they never listened. I'm not saying I have all the answers, but when many senior team members bring up the same issue and the same solution and it isn't seriously considered, that is a problem. I had 6 managers in 3 years with the company. 2 were sub-par, 3 were doing their absolute best, and 1 was checked out and left fairly quickly for greener pastures. Even the managers doing their best have their hands tied by upper management and have no real decision making power.
I was on two different teams while there. Both were in the 401(k) space, the second one was sold to me as a more project based team that mostly worked behind the scenes. I had to fight tooth and nail with my manager to even allow me to interview with that team, and even then, once I got the position, my manager forced me to stay on my old position for a month before they'd let me go. Not sure if that was some kind of power move, or due to some personal grudge they had against me. Within 2 months of my new position, we were all dumped into the phone queues. Not only did we still have our (fairly complex) project work, but now we had constant phone calls coming in. Then another team was dissolved and their work was also dumped onto our laps. Did we get any kind of raise? Did we get any kind of exemption from the queue metrics since we had a major project queue on top of two teams worth of phone queues? Of course not.
I would also like to discuss upper management for a moment. During the early days of COVID, we were all sent home with our equipment and told it would be temporary. Fine, remote work is ok if people are still doing their work. Then they announced that they would be ceasing our 401(k) benefit and that we wouldn't be receiving our annual raises either. I said ok, they must be undergoing some kind of hardship. I'll happily miss out on benefits if it means they don't have to fire people. They must have forgotten that they're a publicly traded company, and that we can see all of their finances. They made more than enough to pay for all of our raises and benefits, it was just pure corporate greed that made them stop.
At that point I realized they truly didn't care about us in any capacity, and I left as soon as I was able.
I guess the point is that Paychex is a badly run company full of people just getting by and doing the bare minimum. Upper management does not care at all about the product, the customers, or their employees. Middle management is a mixed bag, and even the best of them really can't do much to help you out because they're just as beholden to the arbitrary metrics as you are.
There are some truly wonderful people there, and some people who work very very hard to do their best every day. They are few and far between, and most of them leave as soon as it's possible.
I would not recommend working here for any extended period of time, except maybe to get some experience and then move on quickly. The pay is below industry standard, even though Paychex will insist it is not. I'm sure the company will be around for a long time considering their low costs and high income, but the employees will not benefit from it one bit.
