Pros
Great benefits, Remote work from home job, excellent equipment/computer/monitor/headset provided, The product is solid and easy to sell.
Cons
Abusive/sadistic/hazing culture with your supervisors and managers as the perpetrators and no help from human Resources. Even if you reach out to HR to discuss what’s happening to you, you will receive zero empathy. Their only concerned about protecting their friends that dole out the abuse to the poor call center sales agents suffering at this company. And the micromanaging down to every detail of every word you say on every call they record is at a level no one is prepared for. The head of the department threatened me and told me that I would never move up never transfer never get approved vacation never get to take a FAA and she has held true to it. I have been trapped in there for almost 2 years. I’ll because they took a booking away from me when I first started because of a policy, I followed from what I learned in class and they said that it didn’t apply to my situation even though it did and when I argued about losing the booking, this woman threatened me in front of my male supervisor, but of course he said nothing, Even if you report to the ethics line thinking that someone higher up will help you, they won’t. Learned the hard way that letting HR know if there’s a problem in this place it’s just a way of putting a target on your back so they can come after you and find something to get rid of you for. Because they change policies and procedures so frequently on almost a daily basis, you will be hard for us to keep up with everything and if you make one mistake, they can use it as way to start putting you on disciplinary action as justification. The commission structure is a joke. They hide it all through training, no matter how many of us ask, and only later will you find out that you have to hit 67% conversion rate which means if you get 100 calls in a month you had better Cel 67 of those calls or else. What you won’t know is it they are going to give you all the other calls and the call center through overflow, so you will get customer service calls that have nothing to do with sales and even though they tell you, it won’t count against you. it’s a big lie, it shows right on all the spreadsheets And charts that they send you every day showing that when you got a call and they just wanted to know when you close, or they call and get wrong number and hang up on you, every one of those calls count against you. Then there’s wave season, which is when it’s busy in January and February at the beginning of the year, but during the summer months, it often slows down and you have to rely on having a portfolio of people to call you back and book with you. It’s also luck of the draw as to what calls you get. So no matter what, if you get a lookieloo, who’s not ready to buy anything yet, it’s held against you. Additionally, they do not advertise (at least at this time), for the Travel Agent sales position publicly. They get people in a sneaky way by stealing them from the hiring process that’s ongoing for agents that wish to work and direct sales. Direct sales agents get to speak with a customers directly and sell to them and make the most money in the company. I applied for that job originally, but if they find out, you’ve been a travel agent or worked at another agency for Cruises or air, they have friends in higher positions that pass your résumé onto, the woman who has the travel agent sales department and then she may decide to call you separately. So if they see that they will stop you from becoming a direct sales agent because so many hundreds of people pass through there as the turnover at Viking is ridiculously high because so many people can’t survive the job. But Viking doesn’t care about this because they know they’re going to get enough people answering their ad every year during wave season and what you don’t realize is that they consider 75% of their hired salesforce to be expendable/replacable/not valued. Then they offer you that job and tell you that they’re not going to offer you the direct sales job you applied to. They tell you you’re welcome to reapply for that job if you want, but that this is the only job they’re going to offer you. If you take it, you will find out that there is no support for you to move up or around as you will get the worst schedule possible at the bottom of the barrel because you have no seniority, and your metrics will be impacted by the fact that you are at the last schedule of the day, so you get the least amount of calls because it slows down for the last two hours of the day so you will always be getting less than everyone else above you that’s been there longer, and you get the idea, I used to think that the founder had no idea that this was going on right in front of him, when he’s there , but after seeing what I’ve seen in this place, I’m actually starting to think that maybe they are well aware of it and are choosing not to care. They just lost a lawsuit recently, an employee had a class action suit against them, but it doesn’t seem like it made any difference. There are a handful of decent supervisors there, but I would say that over 65% are not very kind or experienced At treating employees with respect. I cannot recommend this company to anyone that loves travel or wants to be in sales, as I was not given the chance I deserved. I would tell almost anyone that unless you want to have stressful days every day, a horrible schedule with split days off and no hope of it changing for at least a couple years, Threats to your job constantly, and one of the oldest most archaic based systems to work on crashes regularly and interrupts your day as well as all all the other bad things I can’t list, I just would not recommend anyone to go through this. , Don’t walk away, you can find a work from home job where people treat you decently, that’s what I’m looking for right now. Steer clear, mateys!