Vantaggi
Because the office environment is so toxic, the salaries are higher than in any other comparable workplace. That's it. There's no other reason to expose yourself to this type of abuse.
Svantaggi
Our own little bit of North Korea in Madison, replete with a personality cult surrounding the management. It's an environment where public shaming is the norm and where coworker is pitted against coworker. For example, every three months, each employee is subject to a peer performance review where any other employee is encouraged to anonymously criticize said employee. The peer review is conducted just prior to the issuing of the quarterly bonus and an employee who receives a greater number of negative reviews receives a smaller share of the bonus. The legitimacy of the criticism is never questioned by management and is treated as gospel in spite of the fact that groups of coworkers will act as a cabal to deny an less popular employee an honest share of the bonus. Management publicly posts a graph showing each individual's daily sales and first call resolution performance which sounds reasonable until one considers that RockAuto employees are discouraged from making direct sales. The sales are calculated using a complex formula involving data derived indirectly from a transaction record, information which isn't available to the employee being evaluated. The First Call Resolution FCR) is a bit more direct but the data is equally obscure. If a RockAuto agent receives a call or email and notes the conversation in the transaction record, then the customer calls back with a comment or question and reaches another agent, the initial contact receives a demerit. The management believes every problem can and must be resolved in a single contact. Unfortunately, as a RockAuto agent, you will have little control over whether the customer contacts RockAuto a second time. A high FCR score over a three month period will result in termination and RockAuto has lost many excellent employees because of this. Some agents find it more prudent to simply avoid adding notes to the transaction record; you will be reprimanded but you won't necessarily be fired. And, when an employee is fired, there is no announcement. The employee's name and extension disappear from the contact record and current employees avoid mentioning him or her. This results in a weird situation where customers call to speak with a specific employee and the agent only realizes that employee was fired when their extension no longer exists. Because employees with a greater number of customer contacts will naturally have a lower FCR score than employees who answer fewer calls and/or emails, terminations are commonplace, which is why RockAuto is always hiring. If you accept a position here, you will always worry that a series of bad peer reviews or a low sales or FCR score will result in you losing your job and, as in my case, more than a decade of loyal service mean nothing. The employee manual spells out the proper procedure for handling most situations which arise however, the manual changes daily and the procedures change constantly. In fact, there is a staff dedicated to changing the manual so no rule is constant and the way a problem was handled last week is handled entirely differently this week. As a Supply Chain Manager, you will be responsible for the shipping performance of a warehouse halfway across the country. RockAuto doesn't own the warehouse (or any warehouses, for that matter) and the staff of the warehouse is often indifferent to your concerns. If your warehouse(s) fail to live up to the performance standard set by management, it isn't unusual to be publicly chastised in the middle of the open office and this rebuke will be so loud that other agents will have trouble hearing customers on the phone. This admonishment has reduced some employees to tears and caused others to simply walk out. If you're the least bit sensitive, avoid RockAuto. The RockAuto online catalog is rife with application errors so there is a constant stream of angry customers calling because they received the wrong part. As a customer service agent, you will be expected to defend the veracity of the catalog and convince the customer that they ordered incorrectly. RockAuto ships using some untrackable methods and you will be expected to placate the customer who's order is late and can't be tracked. If you make an assumption that the order is lost or didn't ship (which happens surprisingly often) and you reship the order, you could be reprimanded. You will be asked by management to make judgement calls, but faulted when you do so. In essence, there is no positive reinforcement at RockAuto: it's all stick and no carrot. Everything you do is monitored and management stresses what they perceive to be your weakest skills to review. As an employee, you will never hear management utter the words "good job", but you will here "what were you thinking???" and "that's not the way you should have handled that" on a daily basis. Management uses the threat of termination to keep employees in line and, as a result, moral is the lowest of any other place I've worked.