Pluspunten
There were some great peers and managers. Snacks are good.
Minpunten
In my 3+ years at Jolt, I followed them through multiple changes. At first, I really enjoyed my job and the opportunity to teach the product to our customers. There were some small things that concerned me, but we were collaborative and knowledgeable enough as a company to work through these things. Things to a dramatic change for the worse just before the pandemic. In early 2020, Jolt laid off half their workforce, at the behest of their investors. We had to take care of more accounts than we had bandwidth for, surely to keep each employee more “profitable”. Employees have to regularly work 10-12 hour days just to keep up, sometimes not even being able to read their emails in that time. As the company got greedier, we turned our focus to large enterprise accounts, putting all efforts on surface-level changes to attract large brands. But all this did was make our product more complicated, while abandoning product changes and improvements our existing customers were begging for. And of course, if the needed changes are ever made, there is an additional cost tacked on. Customer Success Managers at Jolt know the product better than anybody else. They understand the use cases for it, how customers are using it, and what they want. Every other department heavily relies on CSM knowledge to do their jobs. But whenever we tried to share our feedback for improvement, we were dismissed and told that’s not what customers really want. Whenever we tried to express how company policies could change to help our customers (billing issues, bugs, etc), we are told to put up with it. Recently, Jolt introduced an Employee Review program. As laid out by a document that goes on for pages and pages, employees have several metrics that they must fulfill in order to keep their jobs. Employees are given a numbered score, which is then debated amongst the managers of other departments, who have little context for how well these employees are doing at their jobs. If you are unfortunate enough to have a low enough employee score, you are placed on a Performance Improvement Plan (PIP), in which you are micromanaged to a humiliating degree, with stricter required metrics. This includes having all daily activities scrutinized, always with somebody looking over your shoulder. Multiple employees have been put on PIPs as a way to “put a fire” under them to somehow perform better, while management does little to make a better product and a better working environment. The constant refrain is “Break Through Walls”. This new Jolt value is an excuse for management to brush away any obstacles that employees may face. When we express for years about product changes that need to happen, we’re told to “Break Through Walls” and magically make things work for the customer. You would think that with all these issues, Jolt would at least have a product you could stand by. Sadly, this is not the case. Bugs go for months without resolutions. There is an app - Jolt Lite - that customers pay for that simply does not work, and has not received any updates in years because nobody knows the coding language. Jolt does not invest time or personnel into updating their knowledge base. Customers are reliant on their CSMs to get anything done in the app, and the CSMs are so overworked that customers get upset, when they needn’t even be in that position in the first place. Whenever another department is overworked, the CSMs get the brunt of it. When there was recently a complete turnover in the support department, we had to take over their calls. When there was a similar turnover in the billing department, we were handling collections, refund requests, following up on refunds, and more. The CSM role is now far outside the scope of what a CSM should be. There is also in my opinion a lot of unethical billing practices. We continue to make it harder for customers to cancel, adding as much red tape as possible. Customers are regularly charged after they think they have cancelled. There is a new emphasis to not “poke sleeping bears”, meaning not to contact customers who are not using the product, as they may want to cancel. Requests for any billing adjustment (which happen often), need to be absolutely perfect or they will be rejected, causing further pain for CSMs and the customer. I have heard of similar issues in other departments, but I honestly cannot speak to that. All I know, is that the Customer Success department at Jolt has been abused and taken for granted for the past couple years. It made it a stressful place to work, to say the least. There were some incredible managers that I had, but their strengths were in spite of Jolt. It’s laughable to me that one of the company’s goals is for everybody to “Love your work, live your life” when the customer success department is nothing more than a punching bag for leadership and other departments.