Edit: take note of the fact that the majority of the positive reviews here are either from a management position or very brief, and not detailed on the day to day workings of this company.
I’ve struggled with how to write this. I left NRTC Managed Services several weeks ago with very little notice, hoping to deliberately reciprocate the lack of respect they have for anyone else’s time but their own. I worked specifically on the call floor as a “pod” agent. I can’t attest to the other divisions within NRTC, but this particular one I truly believe could be classified as a by the book, hostile work environment in a court of law, that is how demoralizing it is to be a call center employee for this company. Senior leadership has a pattern of behavior that shows clear intent to intimidate employees into compliance, and they leave it to middle management to do their gruntwork. On several occasions messages were sent to my group through middle management, in a team chat, making general threats to the group as a whole, even if transgressions were isolated to one or two techs. Threats included things like “pod removal” (demotion), mandatory overtime and sometimes non-specified threats of termination. These messages to my understanding were cleared by senior management and were not the actions of a sole individual. We were expected to at our own discretion determine if said messages applied to our employment situation specifically. We were told by our direct supervisor on several occasions that we should know who we are in reference to the threats. The people running this portion of the company, including CEO Rich King, are beyond out of touch with the needs of their workforce, or what’s reasonable to ask of an employee making less than $20/hr. They demoted an employee going through chemotherapy because they had to call out frequently as a result of their illness. Team leads would consistently badmouth floor techs, stating in a video conference I personally attended that the incoming techs over the last several years have been progressively lower quality. Which is ironic considering there’s a monetary incentive program for team leads to deliberately demoralize floor techs. The tickets we placed were monitored by team leads and when any minor error was caught, those tickets were flagged and we were “coached” on the error. Following too many errors, regardless of employment duration, you were subject to penalization. Some of the consequences included demotion, denial of future promotions and denial of bonus program eligibility. There was a known lead who would sit and watch tickets come in, mark them after the hour timer expired and rake in bonus incentives as a result. This employee was subsequently promoted. At one point, during a particular outage for a member company, we were instructed to not place tickets in any system, as it was a known issue that did not require individual customer escalation. Following the resolution of this outage, I and several other teammates were informed that our positions were potentially up for termination, as we’d made the mistake of not placing tickets for hundreds of calls we’d received that week. It is a team lead’s responsibility to catch errors such as this, communicate them to senior management and the member company. All of this was done, but upon a 5 minute inspection from our direct supervisor it was determined that the lead had neglected to mention that we were explicitly told NOT to place tickets. Three or four of us spent hours in a workday under the assumption that we may be out of work, only to have our direct supervisor verbally apologize. Not so much as a “psych we gotcha good there” from senior management despite their swiftness to come down hard on us. Nothing in writing, they swept the mistake under the rug, I think they terminated the lead but I am unsure. When I was first hired on with several other coworkers from a prior company that NRTC had outcompeted, there was an individual who was transitioning from a customer service role to a technical support role, so it was a drastic learning curve for them specifically. Additionally since most of us had come from a technical support background, NRTC saw fit to shorten our training timeline from five weeks to two. As a result the coworker who had no experience in TS was not adequately prepared to take on the position following completion of training. I witnessed this coworker and several others communicating to our trainer, and our at the time direct report, that this employee would require additional resources. They agreed at the time, but resources were never provided, and the employee expectedly fell behind in performance. The employee later described NRTC’s treatment towards them as hostile. The two management level employees who were made aware of their lack of experience in the tech field, denied ever being told about the circumstance, they lied. When our new manager tried to find them a position among the customer service team, no spots were available and the employee sought work elsewhere. The manager who lied about not knowing of this former employee’s concerns, was then later promoted. NRTC sends out company reviews annually, after having submitted my own shortly before I chose to leave, and having communicated to my teammates in a group forum that I hoped senior management would see it, it was made apparent to me in aforementioned group forum, by middle management, that senior management does not actually review or care about the feedback submitted. I’m unsure how a supervisor thought that telling a group of employees this would do anything besides deflate what little morale existed, but to be completely honest, most middle management experiences an equal if not more grueling level of abuse at the hands of senior management. In fact, at one point my direct supervisor communicated that they’d brought to the attention of senior management that techs were especially burnt out at the time, the alleged response from senior management was that they “didn’t notice”. I have a plethora of other stories that I could include in this review, but I don’t think all of them are necessary and I would like to not be personally responsible for whatever awful punishment senior management may devise against people whose interactions I was less than satisfied with. Additionally this place brought out some of the worst aspects of my personality, and I am beyond ashamed of myself for letting their toxic work culture drag me to the level of emotional disparity that I experienced. I should have left the first week on the floor, I knew in my gut that working at that company was going to be a professional setback and am now reaping the consequences of that decision, don’t be me. Senior management is not going to take ownership for their behavior, they will continue to misdirect attention until the issues that arise become null. This workplace has no future of becoming something desirable. Call Center CEO Rich King frankly needs to step down, because he’s running a company of individuals that have malicious intent, whether they’re emotionally intelligent enough to recognize it or not. I am not surprised that in the middle of an immense national wealth disparity that he or anyone else at that company, lacks perspective on just how beaten down the workforce of America is, as a direct result of their willful ignorance and hubris. DO NOT WORK HERE.
