1st con right off the bat - I feel that I have to do this anonymously in order to avoid career suicide.
It is my opinion that if Zonar wants to succeed, and get over this slump of severe customer churn and employee turnover, several things will need to happen. With that said, applicants should think twice before accepting an offer. Know what you’re walking into.
Boiled down, the quality of a brand or overall success of a company relies on three things: People, process, & product. There are some major failings in each of these three things, in my opinion, where Zonar needs correction.
PEOPLE
Anyone on the inside who have been here even just a year would tell you: since the Continental takeover, employee confidence and morale has come to an all-time low. Our new leadership has had over two years at the helm and I am not sure what they have accomplished or what our vision as a company is, except to expand into new markets and do more. We have some smart people at the top, so they say this with PowerPoints and this box graph with arrows to show expansion. At least one of them is a Harvard educated man, but they seem to lack certain skills to propel an organization like Zonar forward (onward). The whole c-suite seems to be a bunch of risk-averse, yes-man types, out of touch with what is happening on the ground. You’ll read about an old boys club from T-Mobile in other reviews on this page, I don’t think many people would disagree with that (a damning review from just under a month ago, has mysteriously ‘disappeared’ off of Glassdoor). Nevertheless, it’s not all about the C-suite, it just ends with them; and the buck has to stop somewhere. Another thing: Corporate politics. While it does happen at many companies, for a company our size, there are too many people in key positions more concerned about padding their resumes and positioning themselves and their interests to look good rather than delivering any substantial results (increasing brand image and reach, helping our customers quickly, creating products that ‘change the game’, etc.). As someone who used to consider themselves a true believer in Zonar, this is truly disheartening – and outside of our shoddy product releases (I’ll get to that in a bit), this is a big reason why morale is so low at HQ (don’t take my word, read more of these reviews). Personally, I think that is a simple fix – focus on coaching and hiring better management, then holding them accountable to concrete standards. We are bleeding our best people right now – people who have been here for years. Employee turnover as a whole is insane at this company, out of control. Sure, part of that is the job market right now, but much of that is because our leadership has done a terrible job of valuing or hearing out their people, so they get sick of it and it makes it that much easier to leave. There is a trust that needs rebuilding from the C-Suite down; and my belief is that it needs to come straight from the board – making a change at the C-level, to show the employee base they are serious about making Zonar great for their employees again.
PROCESS
One of the great draws to Zonar used to be that we are a young and rising star in the tech space and even though we are growing, we still act and maneuver like a startup: agile and quick to respond to our customers’ needs, while also doing whatever it takes win new customers. This simply is not the case anymore. We are slow and bloated, and customers have now left us for it. We have managers who rather create policy and rules, ping-ponging issues back and forth rather than using some common sense to do whatever it takes to help our customers. I think there are two main drivers here: First one, with poor management that starts at the top, people easily fall into the machine of creating and following processes as their primary job function. This happens mostly because it’s easier, but also because without the motivation from decent leaders to keep their customers first, people default to being lazy – which is what our processes allow for: the minimum work needed for success. There is a comfort to that. I don’t need to worry about certain things because that’s not what I do. It’s someone else’s job. It’s not the process. This department doesn’t do that. The second driver is that the company seemingly refuses to invest in proper internal tools (because it would cost significant money based upon how far behind we are, and hurt our EBIT goals – and we have a huge focus on needing to make our numbers look good for Continental). Here is a real and constant situation we face (tell me if you would want this out of a company that you do business with): a customer calls in and asked what services they have on each of their vehicles. They also want to know how much they are paying for each vehicle, and when each vehicle’s service date ends. This should be a simple task to tell a paying customer what they paying you for… but this will take up to two weeks and three different departments to figure out. We are a technology company stuck in the 1990s with our internal tools, and in the age of 2-day delivery from Amazon – it just does not cut it for our customers. With systems that create headaches like this, why wouldn’t a person be inspired to create a process that deflects fault and responsibility off them? A focus on selling our company to Continental, and now keeping our EBIT numbers in check for them, have been the largest contributors to bloated processes and lack of investment in our internal tools. This is all very bad for our employees, and worse, it’s bad for customers – and they are both are leaving us for it.
PRODUCT
*stops and composes thoughts* What the heck are we doing?! This is one of the greatest mysteries to me. We’ve lost our soul as a company when it comes to what makes us unique and awesome. We have so many projects and products that we are trying to work on and release, that we’ve forgotten that EVIR is what makes Zonar, Zonar! But when we do release new products, we like to release “MVP” versions – which in theory is great, especially for startup types. However, all it has become is a cash grab, because we are behind schedule, and because we need to hit these numbers we budgeted for. Push something out, regardless of quality, so we can sell and start making money on it. Then we promise to clean up the bugs & UI as issues appear… but it takes us several months, even over a year to clean it up! These are products that customers are already paying really good money for!! By the time the MVP product goes to market, we’ve already gotten too distracted with the next MVP product release, to even consider dedicating resources to cleaning up the bugs from that release… and so then the cycle continues. And continually our customers get frustrated, filling up our help desk phone lines.
