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      Customer Systems

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      Customer Systems Reviews

      3.1

      58% would recommend to a friend

      (12 total reviews)
      avatar

      Steve Austen

      43% approve of CEO

      56% positive business outlook

      Ratings by category

      4.0

      Compensation and benefits

      3.7

      Career opportunities

      2.7

      Culture and values

      2.7

      Work/Life balance

      2.6

      Senior management

      Reviews by job title

      12 reviews
      1.0
      16 Aug 2013

      Please talk to former employees in person before signing up

      Principal consultant
      Recommend
      CEO approval
      Business outlook

      Pros

      Hands on experience in projects

      Cons

      Expect to get treated like a child. Anything you say/do that is not EXACTLY in line with what the MD is thinking will get you in trouble. You WILL not have any freedom to express your ideas or choose your specialisation. I know for a fact that the positive reviews on this site and by either the MD himself or senior management at his request - My source: I still know people who work in the company; Also, please note that the only 3 positive reviews currently on this site are all written within a few days of each other. When the leadership of an organisation resort to such tactics, especially with such level of personal involvement on something that is written online, you only need to extrapolate this scenario to figure out what happens within the actual firm. The MD, in his replies to the negative reviews, keeps talking about how many existing and former employees keep praising Customer Systems about how fortunate they were to have worked there: My humble advice would be - Please ask the existing employees or any former employees directly for an honest opinion about Customer Systems, more specifically about the management, and then make up your own mind about the company. Now let me address some of the myths that are being propagated with these positive reviews that are on this site: [client list that is second to none] I can name at least 5 IT consultancies off the top of my head (Google for the biggest IT consulting firms in the UK), that work in the same technical spheres as CS (Siebel CRM, OBIEE and SAP CRM), that have more influential and bigger clients than CS. [solve their problems at a fraction of the cost and faster than the big consultancies] The scale of the projects most "big consultancies" deal with are out of the league of what a company like CS can even do, simply because they lack the resources. Conversely, big IT consulting firms are not interested in smaller projects simply because it is not financially viable for them. In a scenario like this, how can a fair comparison be made? Please elaborate. Additionally, if this were true, then why is it that we lost so much business in the last year (We had some of our biggest and longstanding clients leave us)? The amount of work available in the technical spheres of CS's "expertise" has not declined in the last 3 years. [People that I worked with at Customer Systems have progressed similarly and amongst these I see another MD, senior execs at software companies and at all of the main consulting firms, senior managers at many large international corporates] Really? It is absurd that none of the other ex-CS employees know of any one who currently is an MD, Senior Exec or even a Senior Manager at ANY of the major IT consulting firms. I don't know about how the reviewer qualifies a company as a major IT consulting firm, but if it is anywhere along the lines of how most people would define it, this statement is definitely NOT true. [Take with a pinch of salt the views of a consultant who is surprised at a dress code which is simply to wear a smart business suit, white shirt and tie.] Could the MD of CS show me a positive co-relation between employee productivity and wearing white shirts to work? No. The reason being there is none. It's not 1960 and your certainly not Don Draper. Get over it. [Integrity: Steve and Duncan made this central. Many firms pay lip service.] Yes; hiring someone that has no prior work experience, training him for 6 weeks and then selling him to the client as a highly experienced consultant is the epitome of integrity. I'm not saying other firms don't do this, but Mr. Pot, I would appreciate it if you could stop picking on Mr. Kettle.

      avatar
      Customer Systems Response
      12y
      Firstly, please see http://www.customersystems.com/employeefeedback . re [I know for a fact that the positive reviews on this site and by either the MD himself or senior management at his request - My source: I still know people who work in the company; Also, please note that the only 3 positive reviews currently on this site are all written within a few days of each other] Accusing me/us of fraudulent misrepresentation is not something that should be done lightly. It is defamatory libel. The truth is much simpler than your silly conspiracy theory. The reason those 3 reviews all appeared within a few days of each other is that, in response to the negative reviews, I contacted 3 ex-employees to see if they would contribute their thoughts to the site. One is someone I have beers with occasionally (and, yes he IS the MD of a consulting company). The other two were people I have not seen since they left the company some years ago. Without hesitation they each enthusiastically agreed to. So, here's what I suggest. You contact me and arrange to get together in a Starbucks and I will show you the email conversations I had with those people. If you think I fabricated the emails, then you can contact those 3 individuals and check out whether they are genuine. Then, when you understand how wrong your accusations are, I would hope that you would publish a public apology on this site and anywhere else you have repeated your false accusations. In truth I doubt whether you have the courage to do this. Lobbing insulting falsehoods from behind a cloak of anonymity is probably much more comfortable. Indeed, I wonder whether you even care whether your damaging comments are true or not. re [why is it that we lost so much business in the last year (We had some of our biggest and longstanding clients leave us)? ] and [40% of their workforce (including some of the senior most people) left the company last year ] seems to me that one of two things are true. Either these are wrong in which case they are further malicious falsehoods or they are right in which case you are violating the confidentiality undertakings you signed and the confidentiality obligations which are deemed by law to be implied in all employment contracts.
      1.0
      10 Jun 2013

      As a Graduate, you don't realise how bad it is until you have left and work for a normal employer!

      Principal consultant
      Recommend
      CEO approval
      Business outlook

      Pros

      High graduate salary with regular pay increases. High levels of responsibility at client's sites. Exaggerated job titles (if that is your kind of thing!). Principal Consultant in 2 years.

      Cons

      The HQ in Chertsey has the atmosphere of a morgue. Talking amongst peers, be it work related conversation or not, is strictly frowned upon. Intelligent people are hired and given a great deal of client responsibility early in their career - however, a stint of 'benched time' in the head office is like being time-warped back to what I imagine a Victorian nursery school may have been like, where almost everything is banned. Considering how infrequently a client comes to the head office (once a year perhaps) you may rightfully expect it to have a slightly more friendly and dressed down feeling than on a client's site - this is certainly not the case. Finally, there is no clear information flow in this company. Communication between the management and employees is shocking, openness and honesty are certainly not values of Customer Systems. Instead, information is passed down through a web of rumours, mis-heard conversations and general mayhem, making it very difficult to feel comfortable working there. Considering there were only 25 employees when I worked at Customer Systems, this could very simply have been avoided, so I can only suggest that it was intentionally this way.

      avatar
      Customer Systems Response
      12y
      Comments from Steve A Firstly, please see http://www.customersystems.com/employeefeedback So much of what I said in reply to the previous review is equally applicable here that I am inclined to refrain from repeating it here but rather to direct you to the review above I would like, however, to address the topics contained in [The HQ in Chertsey has the atmosphere of a morgue. Talking amongst peers, be it work related conversation or not, is strictly frowned upon..Vitorian nursery school..almost everything is banned.] Well, of course, working isn't banned and, if we're still paying you at a time when we we don't have a project to use you on, then expecting you to do some work isn't wholly unreasonable. Try to look at it like this just for a moment. If the office is filling up with people whose services we haven't sold, then we have a problem. Taken to its limit it can become a fatal problem for the company - It's really not a joke. Some of our competitors have gone to the knacker's yard because of just this problem. So this is a point of maximum stress for the people whose job it is to sell your services. Just at the point of maximum stress a whole bunch of extra people come into the office and the way they conduct themselves has a considerable effect on the poor folk for whom this office is their normal workplace. A truly mature way to act would be to ask what you can do to help with the sales process and so gain some extra skills which could turn out to be precious to you in later life. Buckling down to whatever technical work you are assigned is also perfectly OK. But when a group of consultants arrive, who to be fair, have probably just worked very hard on the project they have just completed but now see time on the office as holiday camp time and show no consideration for others, this is really just a way of multiplying the stress of the people trying to dig the sales situation out of a hole. So, having loud lengthy conversations about non-work related subjests is very unwelcome. Some people also, through not fault of their own just have loud voices and even work-related discussions if conducted loudly and lengthily within earshot of others trying to concentrate, is unfair. What is asked of people in this situation is that they take their lengthy loud work-related conversation off into a meeting room of which we have plenty. Also, [As a Graduate, you don't realise how bad it is until you have left and work for a normal employer!] Some people are comfortable working for what might be called a normal employer. Personally, I always strived, when I was an employee rather than a business owner, to work for extraordinary companies rather than normal ones. There is no doubt that, in extraordinary organisations, life can be less comfortable for people who crave 'normality'. In the extraordinary organisations I worked in, conflict, arguments, passion, extreme hard work etc were not unknown and conventional notions of comfort were not typical. For me, averageness is not a goal. So there is an element here of each to his own taste. What I do want to stress is that, should you ever try to form your own business (and I mean a real business - not a personal service company) please don't aim for it to be normal. Big companies can survive being normal. Small ones can't survive without substantial differentiation.
      1.0
      28 Jan 2013

      Boutique consultancy that's lost its way

      Senior consultant
      Recommend
      CEO approval
      Business outlook

      Pros

      Experts at Siebel CRM and OBIEE Good graduate salaries Interesting projects

      Cons

      Business is declining due to non competitive consulting rate Most employees leave after 2-3 years Unstructured Training Employees are discouraged from socialising with each other Temperamental management decisions

      avatar
      Customer Systems Response
      12y
      Comments from Steve A Firstly, please see html://www.customersystems.com/employeefeedback.htm Again, some of this duplicates to a degree some criticisms which also appear in some of the 3 reviews above and so I will refer you to the replies above rather than repeat. [Business is declining due to non competitive consulting rate] In 2012, we were shrinking. In 2013, we are growing again [Most employees leave after 2-3 years] The average is actually a bit longer than this but I am not sure I see this as a problem anyway. The travelling lifestyle of a consultant suits people at one stage of their life but, for many, it ceases to suit them later. This means that, unless they are part of the minority that make it to management in Customer Systems, they have to move on. I do not mean to imply that this is the only reason people leave us but the fact that many will leave after 2-3 years is kind of baked into the business model. There are over 150 ex-employees of Customer Systems in the world and many who only worked for us for 2-3 years I remember with enormous respect and gratitude for the contributions they made while they were with us. [Unstructured Training] Our training could be described as unstructured or as structured in a massively different way from conventional training Whatever phrasing you use, there is no doubt that it is extremely different from the norm. We regard our training process as one of our biggest strengths and many of our ex-employees concur with this. We also sell a shortened version of this training to customers and some comments can be found at http://www.customersystems.com/customer-comments
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