customer service representative

retail sales associate

wireless sales consultant

supervisor

team supervisor

Consumer Cellular

This will be long. But I want to be as detailed as I can. When I first started at Consumer Cellular I thought this would be a great place to work. They talked about how they value the customer and their employees. They don't want you to try and sale the customer on things they don't want/need. Talked about bonuses and all that. Which is all true. But what they don't tell you is how strict they are about attendance policy and their ridiculous stats. 

For starters, your training period is 8 weeks I believe it was. During the 8 weeks you can miss a total of up to 4 hours (so if you have to take your kid to the doctor and miss 2 hours, that's it. Your block is used) Right before I started I damaged my knee and had to have physical therapy. Even with a valid doctors excuse, I was not allow to leave early or miss any time outside the 4 hour window. But fine, whatever. I dealt with it and waited until time was up. And the training they give you is not very good. Especially for those who never done a call center. You basically get thrown on the phones right away and left to figure it out. You have help there near you. But the class was so big (at least my training class was) that the TSS's are trying to help 4-5 people at a time. 

After you get on the floor and you are fully trained. It doesn't get much better. The lack of support is mind blowing. We are expected to fix peoples phone, but all the demo phones are old. They don't have any demo's for the iphones. The newest galaxy they have it the J3. There are no troubleshooting guides for phone issues outside very basic stuff. So you basically have to google everything. 

You can't take off for nothing. Have a family vacation planned for 6 months down the road? Can't request off, even if it's unpaid time off. They do give you "occurrences" Basically you use one of these if you miss anywhere between 2 hours to 3 days from work. It's half of an occurrence if you're more than 3 mins late. They will use up any and all of your PTO and STO. So that family trip in 6 months, don't bank on trying to save PTO and use that. It's impossible to save time off here. You miss one day, they'll use everything in your bank. And you only get about 2.5 hours of PTO a month and maybe 5 hours of STO. So you miss two days with being sick, there goes 4 months of time you've banked. And you don't have the option of it being unpaid time. They use it. period.  . If you're out of both and you miss, you're job is gone. I basically had to give up my side business while working here because you can't plan for anything outside your 2-3 days off. (You can work 4 10's or 5 8 hour shifts. Depend what you get) 

And their standards for stats are insane. Some customer's mad because they've been on hold for 40 mins and you are the unlucky person to get them? Oh well. You have to eat the low score they give you, even if you provide great customer service. I had one customer give me a score of 2 because All State cancelled their account (something we have zero control over. We can just sign them up). That and one other lady was mad because her camera phone didn't work and I could not fix it while she was driving.. almost cost me my job. You have to average basically a 7.0 at the end of the month to pass VOC. . You forget to mention a promo or say I can help you with that. Automatically call failed. 2 failed call monitors, you failed the month. Trying to teach some 80 year old how to use their first smart phone? Don't take you time. If you don't average 5.8 CPH, you failed the month. Gotta use the bathroom? Better be quick! You have to average a 95% on the month for time on the phone. Not one individual stat is super hard to maintain every month. It's just there are so many.  This is where it gets frustrating. I've watched people with 3 years with the company get walked out the door because they had a string of a couple bad months. It's a joke. 

I could go on and on about how this place is horrible to work for. But I've said enough.  There are some good things about it. My SUP was awesome. She really cares for those on her team.  I enjoyed working for her. Everyone is pretty nice. And the company will from time to time surprise you with a small bonus or donuts or a dinner or something. But those little things aren't worth the stress and the headaches.

I quit CC a few months ago after being there about 7 months and have waited to write a review so that I would be able to present the fairest view possible:

* The turn over there was massive (even for a phone room). Within 6 weeks of being hired my original group of 50+ had shrunk to about 7, and when I left there were only 4 ( to my best count). The goal there seems to be to keep the top 5% of their performers and to scrub the rest. There were constant conversations about "hiring up" and "refer your friends" but half of the office space was always empty no matter how many new people were hired.

* Training was over touted and under delivered. The trainers were unprofessional in that (when they thought nobody was listening) they openly spoke negatively of their trainees. Direct questions about measurements of job performance and expectations were either ignored or spun with half truths. When I openly pressed for precise and direct answers my questions got pushed aside with ,"we don't have time for that now but will cover it later"..... SURPRISE!!... later never came.  

* Even though we were told that the sales component of the job was small it was not. One of the prime metrics of job performance is sales.

* The benefits that were offered were relatively generous, and the fact that the company  served lunch once a month was also a nice gesture. But CC went WAY too far in pimping its employees in order to  promote its "happy little family" propaganda... don't believe it. The work space and break areas were clean and well lit. The pay was not in line with the work expectations... I presently am employed making more and doing far less with about 20% of the daily aggravation. 

* Human resources and the pod managers present a nice face of caring and wanting to help bit it is actually the facade of a group of individuals who are choking on the "company cool-aid" and are only truly dedicated to preserving their positions within the machine.

* One aspect of the job is trouble shooting a wide variety of smart phones (including explaining to customers how to simply turn on the phone) as well as walking them through the entire process of setting up the phone 
...and how to  connect to Apple/Google ... and how to set up an email acct... and how to transfer data across different platforms...ALL in about 8 minutes maximum per call. Good luck with that.

* The company stresses superlative customer service.... BUT  I was constantly told to ONLY solve the precise issue that the customer called about and NOTHING else. This was in an effort to keep the calls as short as possible. Even if I saw mistakes by other agents on previous calls... even if I saw future billing issues... even if  I felt that the customer didnt fully grasp a particular concept... even if I KNEW that the customer was destined to call in angry about an issue that they were unaware of... I was plainly told to move on to the next call.

* There is more good, and bad, but I am sure that this is enough to give you an idea of what the company is like. CC is not the worst possible phone room to work in but it sure isn't the best either. Some people will find it to be a great fit, but at least 75% of you will not. That being said my best advice is to go in with your eyes open and have an exit plan ready for when the time come to quit, because it most likely will.

This job has the potential to be a rewarding and fulfilling carer however the lack of support and rigid matrix system make this a job not worth having. This company constantly tells employees that they care about you but in reality they view you as nothing more than a chair or desk, their view is anyone can fill your seat, no one is essential or valuable. Evidence of this is their incredibly high turn over rate. The managers have no interest in assisting or helping you improve, their focus is themselves and advancing in the company.

The company constantly preaches "Do the right thing" to the employees but they do not practice what they preach!!! The main metric for your monthly bonus is a VOC (Voice of The Customer) survey, this is a survey that is randomly sent out to customers following a phone call. 

This survey is inherently rigged against the employee and causes you to have to work your way uphill instead of on a level plain. This survey is sent out by email, maybe half of the customers you interact with in a day have an email address, then not all customers you speak with get a survey, it is random as to who they send them out to. The survey itself is rigged against the employee, the options for the customers are a score  1, 3, 5, 7, 9 & 10. The matrix you have to meet is 8.15 to 8.35 depending on your position, the customer does not even have the option to select an 8 on the survey, so you are either perfect or failing.

In addition if you are unlucky enough to receive a call where the customer is upset with the company, perfect example, the billing department made a mistake and charged customers credit card twice in one month, obviously customers were very upset about this and when they received a survey they would give a score of 1 and put a note on the account that they were upset they were charged twice, this had nothing to do with the person on the phone that took the call but that low score was included in your monthly VOC score and you had to eat it and possibly lose your monthly bonus for a mistake the company made!!!!!

If the customer was upset with the poor quality flip phones from the company that constantly freeze and not work, some customers were on their 4th or 5th phone that had the same issues, and cancelled their account because of the poor quality phone you still had to eat their low score even though it was the company fault!!!!

If you do not say at the beginning of a call "I can help you with that" then you failed the call, if you do not mention one of the million promotions on every call you fail the call. Even if the customer is upset because their phone is not working and this is the 4th or 5th time they call in you have to still mention the promotion or fail the call.

The management cares only about themselves and not their employees, their is no assistant just monitoring for errors and then firing you.

This company could be special but they are so poorly run and micr managed that the best people leave, get frustrated or fired for some bogus reason. STAY FAR FAR AWAY FROM THIS COMPANY!!!!!

you start as a tier 1 just like many jobs like this and your first 4 weeks are training that feels a bit rushed and doesn't really prepare you . 

When you go apply you are not applying for a specific shift so it is luck and you better have an open schedule because once training is over you pretty much get whatever they decided and it is usually not great. I asked to trade shifts or something since i would have a hard time making it to work otherwise but this was not something anyone helps you with. They say you can switch with anyone on the floor but the only way to do that is to do it by word of mouth or talk to a manager and have them do an email to other managers (and only your manager can follow up leaving you out of the loop).  



The method of communication here is just crazy and not efficient. most jobs have some kind of method for quick communication in office but everything is email and i mean everything. ( no chat system)

The management is totally wild west as you go to a pod where your manager is in the center literally looking over your shoulder all the time. The plus side would be that it makes them available to help, but most manager i have watched including my own literally make you email or call them on the phone though you are almost arms length away.. 

Also office politics are disgusting. Some managers have their snitches lurking around so don't feel like you can say anything really unless you know the person and you are alone. Straight up had someone telling management things misrepresenting what i said creating super awkward moment with my manager ( though i feel at least that was easily resolved). 

The attendance is what gets most people as you basically cannot be late in the 90 day period. my schedule had a weekend day so it forwards my time i need to be there by 30 minutes. This pretty much screws people over. Turn over rate is bad even with call center standards which are already fairly up there. 

General vibe like you are in trouble all the time or are about to be fired. even in training they would do stuff like tell us to log out of our phone and not say why. 

Anyone that says there is a culture is straight lying unless they mean it is like the hunger games out there and you better make friends with management and hope you get along to begin with. 

The owners seem like good people and i like the overall service provided by the company but they seriously need to figure things out because i see this company going down hill and much of it could be easily prevented. 

Also no free coffee but that is just a perk most call centers i have been at have implemented and it helps a ton.

i would say use this job as a temporary place for a paycheck and seek other employment.

It's an okay job, not great not terrible. Management is nice so that's a plus but the work and expectations is ridiculous. They have several stat metrics you have to keep up with, some being reasonable and some not. They have calls per hour which isn't bad as you only need to take 40 calls a day, they advised a starting pay of $17.50 which they lie about, your starting pay is actually $17.

adherence which is making sure you take your breaks on time this one is unreasonable because if you get stuck on a call and it's your break you get affected negatively despite it not necessarily being your fault and the only advice you get on adherence is gonna be nonsense that makes the person giving the advice sound like they've never done the job.

Attendance is straightforward but note I was put on a final for missing two days and being late twice and that time was supposed to be protected due to getting a ada exemption for my attendance. Which a ada exemption they're supposed to back track your attendance and cover time you missed so your protected, but they decided not to do that and put me on a final.

Sales! This is a sales job, they want you to get one sale per day but you get commissions on sales! $5 for adding a line $2 for a protection plans, after 10 lines added that commission of $5 per line goes up to $10 per line! If you can't tell I'm being sarcastic with the excitement, the commissions you get aren't worth jack unless you make over 10 add a line sales

Customer rating, you get rated by the customer you deal with at the end of a call. Will the rating be fair? Probably not, you can be the best customer service rep in the world but if the customer doesn't get what they want, more than likely you won't get a good rating if one at all

Last thing is your calls get graded by your supervisor and some random quality assurance person. Grading the call is to make sure your following call flow, you gotta say the customers name 3 times during the call, mention how long they've been a member, restate the reason their calling, cant stay silent for more than 10 seconds then have to recap and mention a survey and any sales opportunities. 
This can be a frustrating thing to deal with when reviewing a call that was graded poorly because more than half the time your sup your the person grading the call just did a bad job or was wrong. For me it got to a point where my calls were being graded incorrectly by my supervisor so much I stopped acknowledging them.

You can work from home so that's a plus but overall your daily routine working here is gonna be getting calls to make a payment, fix a phone, a sales call or an abusive customer. If you can put up with that, the metrics, and your direct sup being bad at their job you'll do fine here. 

Also you can bring things in to put on your desk, DON'T DO IT! If you get fired they will break and steal your whatever you brought in and give you the rest hoping you won't notice.

While Consumer cellular offers a decent pay scheme, and always wants to try and do things to show their employees that they appreciate them, there are things that you have to watch out for.

Stats are held in high regard, as is standard for most call centers, and call monitors can be failed for not mentioning a promotion or not saying you will assist a customer in a very specific way. 

The attendance policy is both fair and very strict: During your first 8 weeks with the company you CAN NOT miss a single day. Your first week, you can't be more than 10 minutes late, and afterwards you can not be more than 4 hours late at any given time. After those weeks they allow days missed on an Occurrence system: up to 3 missed consecutive days can be 1 occurrence, less than two hours missed is 1/2 an occurrence. You can have 3 or less occurrences in a 90 day period, and no more than 9 in a 12 month period. Example: if you take 2 days off in September, then that counts as 1 occurrence, and will stick for an entire 12 months, though will not count against your 3 allowed after 90 days. This is why i say it is very fair. It is very strict in the sense that should you be at your maximum occurrence allowance, if you are 3 minutes late to work or back from any break, you will be let go immediately. 


Work expectations can be stressful. As a call agent you are expected to do billing, technical support, and customer service as the day goes on, while contacting a minimum of ~52 customers in the day. (this is higher for higher position agents.) There are limited situations that the training prepares you for when it comes to dealing with strange issues, or upset customers. You are, to be quite frank, expected to deal with it as you go. Although many of your Support Specialists and Supervisors are more than willing to offer advice and run through the scenario with you in order to help you learn what you may need to in case that issue were to present itself again. To assist with the job, the company knowledge base can either be an amazing tool, or it can be practically useless very much depending on the situation and the issue that is being presented, especially if it is a phone that is not sold by the company.


The benefits are very nice, and there are monthly bonuses that are based on sales, as well as randomly announced bonuses by the owners, whom every employee gets a chance to meet and ask questions 2 times a year, typically in June and October. You may also see them during random employee events such as luncheons, which they hold quite often. As well as insurances for individuals and families, the company also offers disability insurance, life insurance, and now holiday pay. 

I would very much enjoy working for the company again, as they do seem to take employee ideas and concerns very heavily into consideration, and are always trying to find ways to help the customer save money where they can.

I only worked for Consumer Cellular for about a month, and a month was too long. Let me start off by saying that a call center job takes a certain kind of person, that person is not me. I will say that Consumer Cellular does offer some good benefits, which they will definitely sell you on when you interview. Company paid health insurance is a nice perk, it is the main thing that made me want to work here. They do also offer a wide variety of schedules but you have absolutely no choice as to what those schedules will be. You have to agree when you interview to working anywhere from 4:30am to 11pm with open availability at any and all of those times. Once three week training is completed (depending on how you rank in sales) will determine what schedule you get.

For me training was an absolute joke. This was the first call center job that I have ever had, I had come from an extensive retail management background. I really did need in depth training on certain aspects of this job which based on the interview, I thought I would get. Our starting training class was 12, we ended with 8 if that tells you something. The first couple of days our "trainer" seemed okay. She was nice enough but I could see right through her and she just seemed irritated to be there the entire time. We trained for 4 days a week, 10 hour shifts for three weeks. By the end of the first week we seemed like we were more of an irritation to our trainer than a class. She was young, inexperienced and yet again I do not understand how she is in a position of upper management. When certain people in our class would ask questions, she would answer them condescendingly or not answer them at all, with the response,"I already answered that". From day one we were set up to fail. We were expected to be trained on sales, customer service and technical support and provide all three to elderly cellular customers. HA, it's a joke! With that kind of training, good luck to anyone.

I did finish top of my class. I was one of the lucky ones who was pulled aside to "pick" one of three schedules I liked. The way that a few of us were chosen out of the class to pick our schedules was done in a way that it looked like we were the class favorites and caused big time resentment with the rest of the class. Once again a fail on our trainer's part. Once I finally got on to the call center floor I was so burned out by the training experience and sickened that they let someone so incompetent be a trainer that I was already burned out on the company. The 86 call per day requirement was ridiculous especially given the fact that you have to handle, customer service, technical support (with the elderly), and sales (less than 10% of calls). I knew after a week on the floor it wasn't the company for me.

So if you enjoy poor training, being talked down to and feeling like you are just a number, Consumer Cellular is the company for you.

When you first start working there they try and pump you up and tell you of all the advancement as well as how most of management if not all have open door policies, they are there for you, they help the community, etc and really they dont care about you. They are money hungry and will blow up your phone/email when they need something from you during the hiring process/paperwork etc but when you need something from them nobody wants to get back to you via phone, email, etc. While working there it seemed as though the trainer didn't know the first thing about training a classroom. He didnt know what was on the slideshow he was showing nor certain answers you had for him about the company. (Red flag) they are hiring so much the turnover rate is incredible because they just shove people onto the phones to make money for them but when it comes to paying you its different. I was "terminated" because I had to go get my daughter from daycare an emergency had happened there but since I wasnt in my second phase I was only allotted 10min of time off period for the 1st phase. I offered to be back within the hr after taking her to the urgent care to see if she needed medical attention they told me if I left to get my daughter I would be fired (company policy) yet they are all about family right? Wrong! Then when it came to them giving me my final check which in AZ they have 7 working days (days the business is open) or your next pay date whichever comes FIRST! Needless to say I still dont have my check. I have contacted every phone number/email I have had between prior emails or cards given to me etc to get ahold of someone. I have emailed human resources, the recruiters, supposedly its been escalated to the managers etc but NOBODY will return any phone calls nor emails. I now have contacted the labor board and have to go thru the court process. Be careful which company you invest your time into. Pay attention to the small things such as putting people in positions that they dont know how to run etc so you can see they are so bent on making money that they can't train people properly to do their jobs, while you work there you give your all 110% but when it comes to their efforts you get none. This is probably the worst company I have ever worked for and I suggest if you are mature and want a good job you look elsewhere. Overall if a company can't do for u when you do for them they are not a good company. If nobody can get into communication with the higher ups then most likely they like to dodge problems. If you are being trained by people that dont know the curriculum they are teaching that's no good. Some serious flags.

I really had high hopes for this company. It sounded great different from every other call center I have worked at. Training was rushed, I did not feel prepared to hit the floor and even if you stated that, you were given a small rundown on what you felt like you were struggling with followed by “you’ll get it”. I will say that training felt far more supportive than actually hitting the floor. As I had multiple issues come up during training and they were there to help me navigate some personal issues. I understand that training cannot teach you everything. That is nearly impossible. Plus customer service is a grab bag you’ll never be able to teach that. But for a company that claims “transparency” it’s not very transparent. In training they told us things that do not apply when on the floor. We are expected to reach out the the our “team chat” before calling the help queue. But when your team doesn’t answer you, and you on the phone with a customer you really don’t have another option. I also experienced a very unhelpful help queue agent and nothing was done about while I was still in training. I felt very disrespected. Also during the two interviews I had I was told explicitly that handle time was not really measured as an important metric, it is still measured but it is not more important than the surveys and other metrics. Because of the demographic that we deal with. These people need more time to help them understand what to actually do with their devices, rather than just fixing the issue and moving on. The onboarding team was very unhelpful anytime I had a question before the first day I felt dismissed, unimportant, and was given very vague answers. During training we were also told if we wanted to switch to consumer cellular we would have to call in to set up the account and then we could go to the store for anything else. There were three other employees there that were trying to do the same as me with misinformation that they could help us. In short, there’s a lot of bridges that are disconnected. The only thing I will say they have got going for them is that they offer part time and do not do shift bids. When I hit the floor I did not feel supported I feel smothered. “Why are you on this call for so long?” “Idk maybe because I’m just out of training and have no idea what I’m doing” You expect us to be experts when we don’t even know what we are doing doesn’t make any sense. 

You have to meet a set of metrics to get any bonuses and to get promoted. To meet those metrics you have to basically not care about the customer and hang up on them wether you fixed the problem or not. Your client base is mainly 55 and up so they don’t understand electronics and how to use them. I was told to basically keep calls under 10 mins to meet the calls per hour goal but not given any information on how to constantly do that. Training was two weeks but now they changed it to one so you aren’t properly trained and then if you don’t meet expectations you are fired. You are only allowed 3 attendance points after that they fire you. So not a good job if you have a family or if you have health issues. When you are hired they offer you a choice of shifts but don’t have much accommodations for shifts. They can change your shift at any time and if the other shifts don’t meet your needs they won’t make exceptions. They are constantly updating the systems but it makes your job harder to do because it either crashes the whole network or makes it even slower. You can’t take the knowledge base home and they won’t let you stay after hours to read it. They tell you read the manuals they are on the website but the manuals and KB don’t cover every issue you run into. Also you have to know the exact word you are looking for to find the article in KB or you are screwed. If you ask for help you get the answer of check KB. If you are doing a number transfer it takes awhile and you are told once we enter the info get them off the phone and if there is any problem they can call back. Human Resources sucks here they are never in their pods when you need them. And if you send them emails or call most of the time you won’t get an answer. You can’t access anything outside the building besides the info on the website unless you are working from home. If you work from home it is full of glitches like delays or you can’t log into the system. And if you have issues it’ll for over a half hour you have to come into the building to work. Overall I was disappointed it sound like a good job and I was happy to help people and they say the customer comes first but that was a lie. 

Top Job Titles	Average Salary
Customer service representative 3 salaries reported	$17.84 per hour
Retail sales associate 44 salaries reported	$18.38 per hour
Wireless sales consultant 18 salaries reported	$20.95 per hour
Supervisor 4 salaries reported	$62,672 per year
Team supervisor 6 salaries reported	$59,333 per year

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