Where do I start...
1. The management. Each manager was on a different page at all times. You couldn’t get a straight answer from any of them as they didn’t even know how to do our job. It was just better to ask those around you. Having managers that have experience in your department and tasks would be helpful instead of those who don’t communicate.
In addition to this, managers didn’t seem to have an attendance policy. If we had a family emergency, medical emergency, or any other unexpected absence, it would count as an “occurance”, or a point towards our total attendance. Even if we had PTO to utilize, it would still count as an unapproved absence. If managers had an unexpected absence, there seemed to be no repercussions for their attendance. This was noticed throughout the entire floor and really hurt the morale. We all agreed that this attendance policy wasn’t fair.
2. Lead quality. As Elite 360 advisors, we had to call out on at least 350 leads individually each day. Beginning in November 2018, we all noticed that the lead quality was declining and quickly. Air conditioning requests in the winter was a large category we saw. This was due to an increase of third-party affiliate websites that would sell customer’s contact information to HomeAdvisor and they’d be angry when we’d call as they all never submitted an actual request. We were specifically told that the quantity of calls/transfers was far more important than quality of each lead. Therefore, we had to deal with the repercussions of these calls without complaint. This leads me into my next point.
3. Quantity over quality. As a company that promotes its core values as integrity, ownership, innovation and attitude, they surely did not exhibit these at all in the last few months I personally worked there. As someone who genuinely cares about people and their experience, it was hard to help those who truly needed it because we were pushed to get a certain transfer percentage each day. Even when the customers didn’t submit a request (third-party affiliate leads as mentioned above) we were pushed to get them over to the pros anyway. In most cases, the pros couldn’t even help the customers with their project. We were judged by our transfer percentage when there was no way we could personally control the lead quality.
4. Loss of large professional accounts due to poor leads. In late 2017, Elite 360 was busy and profitable for not only HomeAdvisor, but for the representatives too. Transfers were easy to get as people were serious about doing projects and everybody took home a great paycheck every two weeks. Sadly, we all knew something this wonderful couldn’t last forever. Unfortunately, we were right. In the slower season (November-March of the following year) third-party affiliates were hired to create more leads for us to keep us busy. The professionals noticed the rapid decline in legitimate projects and would drop out of Elite 360. In between trying to make transfers, we were asked to help with other departments’ tasks to keep us busy and give us some sort of opportunity to make commission. These factors created a downward spiral and leads me into my last topic.
5. Elite 360 was outsourced to the Phillipines. We all found out that our department would be outsourced in an unexpected Monday meeting. They gave us a week and a half to decide whether to go to inbound (which was previously outsourced to Guatemala, but due to poor feedback from customers and a severe language barrier, was going to be brought back to the US), go to Business Customer Care, or basically take a demotion and go to the Project Advisor department. If none of these were an option, we could leave HomeAdvisor.
Due to this abrupt news, there was a mass exodus from HomeAdvisor itself to find other jobs. We all had conformed to the changes that were thrown at us for the past two years. This was the biggest breach of trust and disappointment to all of us who had worked so hard to make a living and make the Elite 360 department successful.
