Severe lack of communication. What little info you do receive seems to have been passed down the chain, and down here at the bottom of the chain you are lucky to hear anything at all. Different managers share different info with their teams. Teams then cross share and the message received is very different. But you are occasionally treated to a rambling message from the top, full of jokes that aren’t funny and so many paragraphs of nonsense that delete is the only option. And when it comes to important information or new systems an email is all you will get (or maybe just a Teams message, why bother with an email. Definitely don’t bother with an in person meeting to discuss anything important. It would be wrong if everyone had an equal chance to listen and ask questions). You will have to figure it out for yourself after an email. Also cross department communication does not exist. Cross department battles however, they do exist.
There is no guide or instructions on how to do anything as a consultant. Everyone is doing things differently. So many mistakes are made because of this. Our clients suffer because you don’t know how to best use the systems we have. A lot of consultants don’t have any experience in the travel industry so clients will be sent quotes with extortionate costs and illogical suggestions. This leads to a complaint that another consultant has to fix, which is a waste of everyone's time. The business doesn’t learn from this, complaints aren’t logged, and no real consequences for us either. We continue plodding along sending meaningless apologies to customers and then repeating the same mistakes. Management don’t care so long as the money is coming in.
But when the clients leave (the service is poor, or course they leave) and the money slows down they panic. A lot of people have recently left the business because of ‘performance issues’. These people had mostly never had a conversation about this or sufficient training to prevent such issues. And when there is not enough work to go around it is cruel to determine someone's future based on sales when they didn’t have enough work to make sales in the first place. There is a lot of worry amongst those left behind. Unless you are in one of the ‘special’ teams who have some ringfenced clients and therefore guaranteed sales. It is very cliquey and elitist. The bake off competition for senior managers helped massage their over inflated egos nicely.
Monthly (unrealistic) targets will not be received until midway through the month (at best). Constantly we are told this will change. It never does. I could easily waste an hour or more trying to pay for something on behalf of a customer, the tools we have are crap. And then I’ll be interrupted by a call which won't have been fairly or correctly routed to me because the call management is not fit for purpose, so I’ll just keep the customer on hold while I transfer to someone else who may well do the same thing again. I might also need to transfer a call when my system crashes for the 10th time in one morning. If I get a gap in calls I might check the unsophisticated rota to see what I am doing next week (it won’t have been factored in that so many people have left so I’ll be asked to change my shift anyway). I might even request a holiday which will probably cause uproar because they do like you to plan your life in Nov for the next 12 months. I won’t call in sick however because I won’t get paid.
