Reviews voor Agoda

Minpunten

Can get a bit too aggressive at times.

Minpunten

A lot of the previous posts seem somewhat exaggerated, which is understandable. People come here to post anonymously and vent about job dissatisfaction, which is unfortunate that they cannot express their concerns at work that might actually result in change.
Managers are more concerned with whom to fire than putting in the time to learn the job in order to better help agents. There is constant drama going on – people reporting each other for every little thing, warnings, excessive amounts of callouts, people being out of work for long periods of time due to alleged “medical reasons”.
There Is also a lot of gossip which would be fine if it weren’t malicious. It almost seems like there is a need to bring down others for your own benefit.
Compared to other locations, company events are very reserved and conservative with a small budget that aren’t fun. The attendance at these events shows the disinterest people have in getting to know each other outside of work.
Many agents have very dysfunctional families with issues that they bring to the workplace. It is not uncommon to hear about domestic violence, spouses going to prison, single mothers’ struggles with their 2-3 kids at home.
The hiring process is flawed – they look for call center experience, so we get many people who are burned out from working years in abusive call centers, getting used to customers screaming at them and reverting to the status quo of “there’s nothing I can do for you”. This place needs people who are excited to start a new job, are passionate about doing well and actually care. It doesn’t matter whether they have call center experience.

Minpunten

If you are not the one love to learn new things, or the slow learner one, this place is not yours.

Minpunten

not always mature management in terms of decisions made

Minpunten

Quick Facts (See below for more information)

- No upward mobility
- Poor management
- Hostile work environment
- Consistent payroll errors

There is no potential for upward mobility, and hard work has no influence over your career development. (Management even passed out a handout with a pie chart indicating getting promoted is 10% performance, 30% image and 60% exposure). For over a year, I personally took on extra projects (most of which were assigned to my manager which I was then asked to complete) both at work and in my free time to meet the deadlines. This included my manager’s quality audits and call listening (which freed my manager up to do things completely unrelated to work. See below.)

All of the Management Team in Providence were friends or family friends of our site leader, which I think contributes to why it seems like most have stagnated and never seem to get any better at their job or be held accountable when they don’t perform. After a year, they finally promoted internally (a role called Team Captain), but they chose people who just “did better” in the application process (which was all of the feedback we received when we were told we weren’t selected). One agent was told that s/he wasn’t selected because s/he didn’t agree with being on call on days off, which is a ludicrous concept for a contact center position. The managers disregarded the scores for the pre-qualifying, open-book assessment so that they could ensure the people they wanted were given the role (after expressing that this time around, the selection process would be fair), which made it extra demoralizing, resulting in most of the non-selected applicants deciding to leave.

After a year of having a promotion dangled over our head to get us to work on additional projects that were outside of our pay grade, it finally became clear that when it came to them fulfilling their half of the bargain, they developed selective amnesia. (Management will consistently remind you a promotion is right around the corner every chance they get. For example, when I was called in on my day off, my manager stated “This is going to look really good when we start promoting.” It’s basically their way of getting extra work out of you, or to dissuade you from reporting something unethical. See below.)

The management has a “do as I say, not as I do” attitude, which sends a bad message to the agents. They want to be left alone so that they can listen to podcasts, read articles (one was even reading an actual physical newspaper when there was a 2 hour wait for clients to reach us), shop online, talk to people on Facebook, etc. Most recently, they had privacy screens added to their computers to be stealthier about it. Then, they’re typically unavailable (or just ignoring you) when you need them for approvals or adjustments, which makes it harder to do your job. (When we brought it to our site leader’s attention and presented a solution, he sided with the management team and told us that we had to learn to wait.)

Over a year after opening, most of the management team are still unable to perform their basic job duties. Their most recent excuse is saying that agents “don’t know how to ask a question,” blaming the wording agents use to request approval or an override as a way to deflect their lack of knowledge. They’re also known to make belittling comments like “I have never dealt with such base-level employees” and “I wasn’t hired to take phone calls” in order to validate their shortcomings. They also gossip to each other and to their agents, which inevitably makes its way around. It’s unprofessional and cultivates an environment of mistrust.

There is a lot of tension among the agents, as many of them don’t know how to behave in a professional setting, and managers fail to react (as it gets brought to their attention constantly). There are workplace bullies that exhibit a malicious pack mentality, which makes the environment very uncomfortable (so much so that multiple agents have already left due to it). Because managers are afraid to address their behavior, the members of this group take advantage, taking multiple breaks, disregard the meal/break schedule so they can be in a group, and cause scenes and commotions on the production floor. They also use intimidation tactics to gang up on people they don’t like. Agents have been confronted by these groups during work hours, making it difficult to feel at ease.

I personally had members of this group refuse to enter elevators or a break areas that I was in, as a means to intimidate me and non-verbally communicate that I wasn’t liked. They even made false claims about me to negatively impact my career. The atmosphere was so hostile that, when I brought it to my Team Manager’s attention, I was told that I “could say nothing, and smell like a rose, or say something and end up smelling like a skunk,” basically threatening my career movement. This is a clear violation of their own Code of Conduct. After nothing was done, and seeing that saying something would clearly impact me from moving up in the company, it seemed like the only way to get out of the situation was to resign.

There are also employees (and managers) that exhibit strange behavior, such as indiscriminately lashing out at other agents or having dramatic mood swings. (One agent was chased by another one with a garbage can, raving that s/he didn’t put a banana peel in the appropriate bin.) You hear a lot about people’s personal lives and problems (domestic abuse, financial issues, legal issues, etc.) which can be uncomfortable. Because managers tune out the production floor, they make no effort to address any of these issues.

You'll work every holiday (Agoda is open 365 days a year), they don't close due to inclement weather and your days off will change on a monthly basis, based on your stats.

Quality is one of the metrics on your scorecard, but the Quality Analysis team (in Bangkok) is basically searching for reasons to ding you and decrease your score (something as small as misspelling something in our internal notes or stuttering during a phone call can result in a QA fail). This factors into you getting the days off you requested as well as your annual bonus. If you successfully contest something, it won't impact the QA score for that month, they just change their criteria for the following month, meaning there really is no way to gauge what they're looking for.

Lastly, the payroll is a mess. They will fail to pay overtime or holiday pay for weeks or even months. Our Thanksgiving pay for 2017 wasn’t paid until well into 2018. They overpaid agents who worked Sundays, and then docked our pay, resulting in deductions totaling up to 600.00. Because payroll is done in Thailand, and there are barely any line items on our stubs, it wasn’t noticeable. (However, I brought the over-payment to my manager’s attention who looked at my pay stub and said “No that’s right. Hard work pays off!”)

No. It apparently doesn’t.

Minpunten

no opportunities to grow

Minpunten

- When they hired me in Bangkok, in the interview they were bragging about how good they were and how they could get anyone they wanted in the company and how they only employ 1% of applicants. Everything seems... over exaggerated. Despite all this, I come from a western country and left a very high paying job. Their offer was MUCH less than my offer back home. I told them I would only stay for a short time in the job and wanted to do it to enjoy my time while it lasted in Bangkok. Despite this, they were so confident and arrogant that I would stay more longer than the time I quoted that even during my exit interview they were like "when we hired you, we knew that you would stay for more longer than xxx time" after I told them I was quiting.

I found them to be quite cocky and over confident of their worth to my career. For a whole year, they bragged on about how they could pay anything to get westerners to come and work for them but when push come to shove and I told them how much they needed to pay to be just as good as my offers back home, they turned around and said "You're not worth that much". I would personally tell them that they aren't worth MY TIME either, but that's above their heads at the moment because they are arrogant..

As for the person that said this:
"There's a tension in the company regarding the low salaries paid to the "local" Asian workforce vs. the high salaries and stock options typically awarded to Western expats (or Asians educated overseas) and senior management."

They do this because they have to, to retain these staff.
The offers are STILL not attractive even for the western expats anyway despite what Agoda says. The salary after tax verse the cost of living is still worse with Agoda than back home in most western countries. The only westerners who work in Bangkok are there for just lifestyle reasons and not money which is understandable due to the nightlife and beach scene.

Minpunten

- Opaque annual bonus criteria: you never know your how much you are going to get in your annual bonus.
- Favouritism: towards some team members
- Despotism
- Poor Senior Management: with a couple of exceptions.
- Micromanagement is the usual work dynamic
- Repetitive tasks: it's all about pricing, reporting in the CRM...
- The internal organisation, the procedures are so complex that it takes ages to solve an easy issue for an hotelier.
- Complex platforms with many technical deficiencies
- Bad reputation in the travel industry
- Negativity is going to be your workday: hoteliers are constantly complaining about Agoda practices and you have to be there in the front line saving the face.

Minpunten

Inflexible working style, office politics

Minpunten

- Very High turnover rate.