Workload
Past the first 3 months of employment, or the initial training period, is when problems start to arise. As mentioned, the training program is great and during this time you will be introduced to the client facing side, where 95% of these clients are automotive dealers (this will be touched on later). While the company preaches continuing education and training, once you receive clients, many times this is impossible to take advantage of because of the workload you receive past the training period. It is not uncommon once a client services member is placed on a team that they will work 60+ hours a week, and are expected to take work home with them after they have left the office, respond to client requests and emails on weekends and days "off", all while being compensated less than the average digital marketing strategist. It is common for employees to feel guilty about taking sick days and vacation days because of their workload, and the company, whether purposeful or not, breeds a culture where you feel your half hour lunch break should always be taken at your desk just in case a client "emergency" comes up. Despite being a digitally based company where 99% of job responsibilities can be done remotely, you are only allowed 1 day to work from home per month, which is seen as the highest of privileges and can be taken away at a moment's notice if certain requirements are not met. Attempting to work from home more than once of a month is more than frowned upon and many times denied, forcing employees to take vacation days to get anything outside of a 60 hour work week accomplished. Because of this, there is no work-life balance for the majority of employees, which becomes evident for outsiders looking in in a short period of time.
As is the case with digital marketing, the field changes rapidly and is always growing. What this also means is that the responsibilities of a client services member has doubled in a short time frame, while the company provides the same or less support and monetary compensation for their employees, as their profits become larger and the people that are on the ground doing the legwork are worked harder for the same, non-competitive salary.
Clients/Client Handling
As mentioned before, 95% of clients are automotive dealers. These are some of the most demanding, unprofessional and cutthroat people that you will work with. While this is great practice for any client facing job moving forward, what makes it more difficult is the way the company caters to their clients without thinking about the employee. The sales team and management are constantly overpromising clients things that they will never have to deliver and then handing the work off to the people under them with no semblance or thought for their fellow employees. The client always comes before the employee at C4, and this becomes more obvious the tougher the client is. Management is quick to listen to client complaints about employees without any pushback, no matter how ridiculous the complaints may be and rarely will have the employees back. Meanwhile employee complaints are not taken seriously and are typically explained away, creating a rift between management and those under them.
Management
Being a company that made their money with automotive, they run on the same, thin profit margins as their clients do. Management is always looking for ways to cut costs no matter what, and the first way they do that is by underpaying and overworking their employees. Most of management has been internally promoted over the years, which from a company intelligence standpoint works. What does not work is that they were promoted based on how good they were at their jobs 3-4 years ago, not how well they do with managing people, something they were never trained on.
To put it simply, the company grew much faster than was sustainable - management focused on hiring salespeople to grow the client base instead of listening to employees and giving them internal support to keep the clients they already had. When this caught up to them and they began losing clients because of the overpromising, the first thing C4 decided to do was create trainings on "client retention", insisting they were not throwing any blame towards overworked employees while also taking no responsibility for the lack of support that caused the issue in the first place. In many cases, employees are looked at much more as assets than they are as people, which furthers the animosity between management and those under them.
