Many Part Timers do not realize they are treated like factory workers in a third world country. HR does not seem to care about Part Timers. Part Timers are not allowed to attend the Holiday Party and are not allowed to attend Dashboard meetings. The company prides itself on being "inclusive" but Part Timers are excluded from many things. This company continues to give employees false hope of professional advancement.
1. Managers only care about how many emails you can solve per hour. You will be written up if you don't reach your quota. You will be fired if you get 3+ write ups. Managers want you to answer at least 12 emails per hour. You are required to take breaks, however, you will be penalized if you do. Many Part Timers work through their breaks to make sure they achieve the 12+ ticket/hour requirement.
1a. The inherent downside to this is that there are many factors that go into achieving a 12 ticket/hour minimum: i.e. what shifts do you work on a particular day? If you work the morning shift for 3 hours, you may not solve as many tickets because the majority of tickets tend to trickle in during the afternoon and evening. How many hours are you able to work per week? How many of your tickets were solved by someone else because you weren't scheduled to work? What is the quality of your responses like if you are only focused on solving 12+ tickets/hour because you're scared of being written up/being fired? Managers don't care about any of this. Many "top performers" who were able to achieve 12+ tickets/hour have terrible quality in their responses to customers, but no one gives a dung because you achieved the target.
Management will only view part timers as robots to solve as many tickets as possible. They want you to work like a robot, but to speak to customers like they're your friend. This is difficult to achieve when you are overworked and underpaid.
2. During holiday season (November - January), the Full Time team will offer up some "Full Time positions" to Part Timers which is a marketing scam. They call this "Surge". They will offer you the "opportunity to work full time hours alongside the Full Time team and you will be trained in L3 topics such as product knowledge and how to deal with disappointed customers".
They will send out an email saying there are "6 Full Time positions available for Surgers" and will expect you to give a reply by the "end of day", i.e. if you have a 2nd or a 3rd part time job, they expect you to suddenly quit your other part time jobs in the span of 8 hours so you can accept this "amazing opportunity" to surge.
2a. "Full time hours" = 39 hours maximum at your current part time hourly pay of $12 or $13 per hour. Don't even THINK about working more than 39 or 40 hours because then they will need to pay you overtime. There were a couple of instances where I clocked 40.25 hours and I was given a stern warning to not go over because I had not been approved for OT. I am pretty sure I was not paid for those extra 25 minutes I worked.
2b. The worst part about this all is that YOU WILL BE DOING THE SAME JOB AS THE FULL TIME PERSON NEXT TO YOU, BUT YOU WILL ONLY BE PAID A FRACTION OF THEIR SALARY.
2c. You will not have insurance. Don't even think about asking if this "Surge" opportunity will provide you with health insurance covered by the company.
2d. There should not be an expectation for employees to drop external commitments within eight hours. If this were truly an "amazing opportunity," you would act professionally and would give at least 1-2 weeks to your applicants to consider the offer. The manner in how "Surge" was presented was completely unprofessional. HR is aware of this but do not seem to want to take any actions to rectify.
Very important: There is no financial incentive to being a Surger. You will never be given a raise or a bonus for doing Surge.
You will be trained on the same things that L3 (full time) know, you will answer tickets and phone calls from the same buckets, you will feel just as stressed as your L3 (full time) deskmate, but you will still be paid the same terrible rate $12 or $13 per hour.
DO NOT GIVE UP YOUR OTHER PART TIME JOB TO DO SURGE.
3. They will dangle the "opportunity to apply for a Full Time" position after Surge, or "Surgers who will be given a leg up when applying for a Full Time opening" in your face, which is false. Even though you will have more product knowledge than other part timers who did not do Surge, you will still be in the same application pool when the full time team offers up an application round.
It is curious to me that the FT team spends time training Surgers and these Surgers have demonstrated that they can perform the same tasks as L3 (full time), but they will still remain in the same application pool as someone else who has not had the training.
Organizations should not spend time training Surgers when they are not being put on the path for professional advancement. This is deception. When hiring someone who has not done Surge instead, you are then investing more resources into training.
4. They will tell Surgers to go back to doing basic level stuff, which is insulting.
5. Hours are totally inconsistent for the part time team. They say they guarantee a minimum of 15 hours per week, but many times we were given 6-12 hours a week. That’s like asking your parents for a weekly allowance. You will not be able to survive on this.
6. When I first started, I was only answering email tickets from Level 2. As time went by, the Managers gave us more duties:
A. Live Chat
B. Answer Phone Calls
These were *NOT* a part of our original job description. These duties are what the Full Time team is supposed to do. I was hired at $12/hour to answer Level 2 tickets ONLY. The Part Time team should have been compensated extra for the additional duties of answering live chats and phone calls.
Once again -- we are doing the SAME duties as the Full Time team but are only being paid a fraction of their salaries. When some individuals asked about a raise, the Managers beat around the bush and never gave a concrete answer. These concerns have been expressed to HR, but again, no one cares about the 25+ members on the Part Time team because we are 2nd class robots.
This Part Time position is suitable for you if you are a college kid, a recent and naïve recent grad, or if you are simply complacent with being overlooked, overworked, underpaid, and unappreciated.
I wear my Birchbox hoodie proudly each day at my new company, not because I love or miss Birchbox, but to remind myself of the humiliation I once endured, to be grateful for the current job that I have, and to be grateful I no longer work at Birchbox.
