customer service representative

forklift operator

entry level customer service representative

service technician

material handler

Peckham

Where do I begin? In my time with this company I have seen many things change for the worse. Before management changed a couple years back, things were tolerable, almost pleasant even. Unfortunately this would not last. Management is now horribly incompetent and exploitative. If you work as a technical service agent, know that you will not be treated as a human being or valued employee, but rather as a statistic and a resource to be used in whatever way management sees fit at the drop of a hat.

There is no stability here, no upward mobility, and no promises. The number of assurances and expectations I was given early on all turned out to be complete lies. Having moved to what was supposed to have been a somewhat higher task order than the base tier one contract, I was assured I would not be handling any tickets for the previous task order except only when asked to on very rare emergency occasions. Now, they plan to make everyone handle all task orders at once with no additional compensation for this additional workload. In fact, they have already started forcing agents to work outside their assigned task orders, again with no additional compensation for over a year now. 

Before, you could take comfort in having a set schedule, with set break and lunch times. Now, everyone is on a flex schedule that rarely stays the same for more than a week, if that, all managed by an ineffectual program using arbitrary information collected from previous years that may or may not even be relevant anymore. 

Also be prepared for forced overtime. Supervisors will not consult you about this ahead of time, and you will be expected to check your schedule constantly to see if it randomly changes. You won’t even be asked if it is doable for you or not, and they will be very unlikely to accommodate you if you approach them directly about it.

Have problems with your phones? Wall clock not recognizing your employee card? Any seemingly simple issue at all? Don’t expect these problems to be fixed in a timely manner, if at all. In fact, you can bring these problems up multiple times for weeks, or even months, only to be brushed off. 

Peckham also claims that they will pay for one COMPTIA certification exam’s cost. This is, of course, if you’re willing to use your own PTO to cover for the time you won’t be working in order to attend their courses in conjunction with Goodwill. I was initially told self-study was an option, on the basis that I use their study resources and follow the provided curriculum before taking the test. This would have been reasonable, except that these resources never became “available”, and then later I was told that self-study was not an option anymore and that the classes were a requirement. 

Do not take anything the management says at face value. Peckham does not value their employees, and will exploit them to suit their needs at the expense of their employees’. If you want to be valued and appreciated as an important part of a team, if you want to be treated with respect, do not pursue employment with Peckham. If you want to take pride in the work you do, knowing your work will be appreciated and will lead to better opportunities, do not pursue employment with Peckham. Peckham is a dead end, and you will not be appreciated or listened to no matter what feigned empathy management will pretend to show you. The more effort you put in here, the more you will be taken advantage of until you either break or simply lose the will to keep playing along. Working here will not give you opportunities to expand your skills and advance your career. You will stagnate here, and I would not be surprised if in another year this place goes under anyway. Just don’t even give them a chance.

You have to resolve calls of all technical types around 15 minutes, chat agents get 40 seconds to answer (and have to talk to four people at once with IT troubleshooting issues).
Not flexible, if you call out sick and have Doctor paperwork they will threaten to fire you/fire you.
No advancement opportunities. 
They will tell you they have IT certification support to get you in the door, this is false and you will be on your own. If you can do this job, successfully, you can probably go to any other IT company. Private sector pays more. 
You may not know who your supervisor is for weeks. They will not get you FMLA paperwork when asked for weeks, if at all. 
They are predatory, meaning they ONLY have their government contract because they use the AbilityOne protection via the government system. They do not care about disabled people or vets, they just need you to keep their AbilityOne status so they can't be bumped off contracts and don't have to stay competitive. It is also government subsidized. Not that you see the money end of that.
Insurance is EXPENSIVE through here, a single adult runs over $600/month. Family will cost you about a grand... per month.
They had the ability to send everyone home for Covid protection, and didn't. We were still working in a massive call center deemed "essential". Then most the work force after a few months went work from home, and management. This left who ever drew "short straws" to work in the office/call center together. 

There is no organization here. You will be expected to read all your updates "between calls" but maintain a fast call or chat time. Or, you have to read those e-mails when you are punched out on lunch or your break. There is multiple updates to processes a day to your e-mail, you are expected to immediately know these updates for your next chat or call. You will NOT have time to read KBA's on the chats/calls, but you are expected not to memorize them. If you have a question, good luck finding anyone. 

They are constantly short staffed, always. 

To work here you need a federal security clearance for many positions in the call centers. That will take months to process, if you live in a marijuana legal state, you can not participate in consuming any of that while working here. You also can not have debt/etc, in order to pass a security clearance. For the security clearance you will have an investigator going through your bills, you will need work and personal references that will need to be willing to talk to the investigator(s). Have your bills,debts, multiple references, and all your history from schools and living locations ready. 

Most the time, you will not leave on time, have breaks or lunch on your scheduled time, but you are expected to be there early for your shift unpaid. 

You will also be required to talk regularly with a "Vocational Service Specialist", keep in mind they work for the company, not you. They are extension of HR but act/behave/make you want to feel like they are a social worker or counselor. If you need any accommodation, even with a doctors note, they have to get your medical records to your VSS and HR and the company will "see if they feel the accommodation is necessary" and see if they can find cheaper alternatives. The VSS's are basically useless and only act as an arm of HR, so, when talking with one... keep that in mind. What you tell them/open to them about, you are telling directly to HR. They pressure you to open up to them. 

As a former employee,  I had to write this, I left to a better healthier job environment. 

They spend $$ thousands to get you through security clearance  but do nothing to retain employees.  There is a EXTREMELY high turnover rate here.  HUGE TURNOVER RATE. Large groups for training & less than ¼ will be there after a year...
If you make it through security clearance you are forced to move upstairs where you have to go through another set of training.  Once on the floor over ½ quit within a few months. They dont tell you how horrible the new role is. And its nothing like what your told before they hired you. You could change supervisors without notice at anytime.  No flexibility whatsoever Unless you have special needs they say they don't care. Upper management doesn't care about employees or staff.  YOU'RE only a body to them. It's the worst place ever with supervisors who don't care about their team. Some supervisors had over half their team on disciplinary actions due to their poor team management skills and their lack of caring.  Upper management like to  set unattainable goals for the App skills and when ¾ of the work force can't met it they change their policy  to suit themselves.
If you're a Peckham employee that's good for you, you have a VSS but if you're not and you're a contractor you don't have anyone to help you at work. They tell you to contact your company your contracted through. They don't want you to talk about your pay as it different for contractors & Peckham employee and how they get paid. Contractors get the full wages but Peckham employee have it differ with some of their wages held for a 403? Also Peckham employee are offered health insurance as contractor don't. But it's extremely expensive  & if you have a family 
it will cost you your full 2 weeks worth of pay $1300 per pay check. How is that even affordable.  Peckham employees are offered things like (paid) paint classes once a month as contractors don't qualify for it. Peckham employees are given higher (huge) bonuses compared to contractors. They offer yoga classes & other classes ONLY if you are a Peckham employee.  Contractors are often excluded from such classes.  Emails go out saying ONLY To PECKHAM EMPLOYEES for such activities.  Making contractors feel like second class citizens.  Don't get on the wrong side of some of the upstairs supervisors as they will make your work life a living nightmare.  Company policy states its business casual but a lot of employees come in clothes that are not business casual, wearing work out clothing  & a few looking very unkempt.  
Heard new work hours are extremely unflexible with only 2 shifts 4:30am to 1pm & 1:30pm to 10pm only if they clear all calls (this summer late shift was there until 2am) and you're NOT ALLOWED to leave at the end of your work shift (late shift only) untill all call are cleared, BTW they don't close the phone lines down so there is no end in sight.  And they are expecting over 2 MILLION calls to come in a MONTH during their PEAK season next YEAR. It was a nightmare this summer with 1 million call in one month. 

If you are looking to start a career in IT and are needing tier 1 help desk experience, I highly recommend going to a different company. I highly discourage anyone from joining the USDA contract that Peckham currently services based out of the Grand Rapids office.

Since day 1 of my orientation back in February of 2015, they have lied about what the offer here. Despite them saying there are advancement opportunities here, there are not. Any move that you can make is lateral at best with minimal pay increases. If you do move to another contract here at the Grand Rapids office, you have non-stop calls and the pay does not justify the amount of work you have to do.

When you first start out, you will likely not even have access to certain tools that you will need to do your job. I know this because for close to two years now I have been a mentor and have helped newer trainees learn the job. The training they receive in class is very inadequate and does not prepare them to take calls, which puts a burden on the rest of the employees because we have to do twice the work.

The management here really has no clue as to what they are doing. You will see this in the type of people they hire. The job postings for this place usually state you have to have an A+ certification or other certs, plus PC experience, etc. But the people they bring in here fall way short of that. For example, they hired one guy who shouldn't even be touching a PC. He has no multi-tasking skills and barely knows how to use a PC. Whenever he gets a call, he has to hand write all of his notes, then after the call is done, types everything into the ticketing system because he is so slow at typing. He is just one example of the many types of employees like that they hire. On top of all that, when they were starting to hire a bunch of supervisors, they completely bypassed the people that had been doing the job for a couple years and hired external candidates.

This department of Peckham has a high turnover rate due to the bad management, lack of training, lack of advancement opportunities, and favoritism. They do not reward employees who have been here long and perform well. In fact, those employees are not valued at all. If you have read everything I wrote and are still considering this job, I urge you to look else where. If you absolutely cannot find anything else, then I wish you luck. I am putting my two weeks notice in within the next day or two.

Peckham in Grand Rapids was a pretty nice place to work for about the first six months of the USDA contract, and things progressively and consistently got worse from there.

Things quickly changed as we found out the call volume and scope of support we were initially told about were, in fact, lies. This lead to days of non-stop calls and no wiggle room for anything due to the also increasing amount of micromanagement in the workplace. 

Increasingly anti-employee practices are put into place in the name of "increasing metrics" all while ignoring the fact that the agent working are indeed people and not cyborgs, implying they have emotions/wants/needs. This has lead to an entire workforce of bitter, burnt out, and indifferent employees.

They have recently harped about how great our metrics are and how we're finally "Fully staffed" as they also talk about cutting hours and offering overtime on the weekends (as they lost their main weekend agents after having them taking calls for every contact not including the one they actually work, which no training or compensation.)

This place is full of great people who care about this place, but have all been basically forced to not care and be out for only their own well being as this place will quickly sap it away from you. You have to borderline call in to get time off as it's borderline impossible to actually get it approved (even with PTO), and you have to use PTO for sick days as 3 years have gone by and sick days have not been implemented) 

This place does everything it can to milk employees dry without providing any sort of compensation (putting untrained agents on contracts that arent there's and still chastising accordingly, having shift bids that at the end of the day dont matter as none of the choices listed reflect what you end up with because "something something business needs") aside from trying to placate employees with food, which is nice but just results in me being full and unhappy, instead of just the usual unhappy.

I dunno. This place fell apart, and it's essentially like watching a family member shoot up heroin.

I would spend my entire shift (barring lunch, breaks and a weekly unit meeting) on the phone taking calls and the call volume was quite high.  As soon as you completed a call and hung up, a new call would come in, especially during the busy travel season (April to July).  This may sound hectic, but it made the shift go by quickly.  And if you didn't quite get enough sleep the night before, you were too darned busy to not remain awake and alert.

I had to learn what all that was needed to apply for a passport, and issues involving citizenship, travel requirements for different countries, etc.  But they train you, and you didn't have to memorize EVERYTHING, but at least know how to find the information on the software program provided, which was quite user-friendly.

I found all of the managers to be helpful and nice.  But their helpfulness only went so far.  After being at the job for awhile, we were expected to be able to find many of the answers on our software.

My coworkers were great--always willing to help.  And a lot of shop talk went on during breaks and lunches--it was a good idea for the newer employee to listen in, because much could be learned.

The hardest part of the job was dealing with disgruntled people.  Some customers seemed to think that you could personally bend the rules because they didn't have the proper documentation, requirements, etc.  Fact is that the rules regarding passports are very strict and that we can't bend the rules for anybody.  Then they'd want to know the reason for the requirement, which we rarely knew (it wasn't necessary to know, because it really wouldn't help them.

The most enjoyable part of the job is that the vast majority of your callers are very nice people and accept the passport rules as they stand.  You'll talk to people from all over the country from many different cultural backgrounds.  Sometimes you'll have to deal with people who don't speak English all that well, but on those calls, you just have to be patient.  Spanish speakers aren't a problem because there is a separate line for you to transfer them.  You'll likely be put on that line if you speak fluent Spanish.

I was recently an employee for Peckham for 3 years. Prior to the new schedule change they implemented, the company went down hill. I suggest anyone who's interested in working here for the DoD contract to read this and know what you're getting yourself into. They measure your breaks in seconds as well, not minutes, so if you have a 15 minute break and you're 15:01 late, or if you have a 7 minute break and you're 7:01 late, they will mark that as late. They will also switch your schedule regardless if you're in school, do not be surprised if they switch you to 3rd shift, or getting up at 5 A.M. coming to work within less than a week notice. If you inform them you cannot work that shift instead of them working with you they will just cut your hours. 

Out of all the three years I've been working I've never had a problem with performance or attendance, in fact mine were above average. Since several employees had left the company because of their schedules, they eventually switched everyone to a very early schedule which effected me since I was in school at the time. I was not able to fully work 40 hours a week and they had me leaving work and coming back in the middle of class, causing me to be late. I constantly tried to talk to management about going back to second shift even if it was temporary, and t he only other option that was given to me was to relocate to the office in Lansing from Grand Rapids. Long story short my performance dropped and my attendance got better but eventually I ended up getting terminated for something I tried to remedy and tried to work with Peckham to improve. 

The company works with Government contract and Peckham responsible for managing their own employees, hiring them, and terminating them. There have been several people who have quit the DoD contract do to policy changes or schedule changes that actually effected them getting to work on time and nothing has been changed done about. I would highly suggest anyone looking to work here not to have any responsibilities outside work if you want to be successful here.

Clock in at 7:00am and begin work. Many mornings began with a short meeting on the day ahead. If everyone was on the same page everything would go well for the day, but from time to time someone would be late and they would have to be brought up to speed. What is on the agenda for the day could change at anytime and you have to able to go with the flow, changing jobs in a moments notice. Logging of product was a must and done daily. Sorting, counting, verifying labeling is clear and correct for what product is packed for shipping. Could also have to measure fabric cuts that have been cut wrong. Fabric patterns had to be sorted and labeled good bad or in between. Non usable fabric was isolated and listed as scrap. Some days you would be required to work at the end of the production line to measure and vis finished product. Tape measure was tool required for the job. Most co workers were great, many were from other countries or had some sort of disability. Management was good as it could be in a production setting, I never had any issues with management. They were very professional. Hardest part of the job were long hours when needed. The most enjoyable was doing something new regularly. I learned how to be patient with many nationalities, how delicate fabrics can be to handle at a high rate of speed, accurate measuring, identifying defects marking and sending to rework, recheck and verifying if they are good for shipping.

Peckham on it's face is a great company. They hire physically and mentally disabled workers who otherwise would have a hard time finding work in the "traditional" job market. However, the management who runs this operation is TERRIBLE. The employee is just an after thought and the only thing that matters is pleasing the client at ALL COSTS. I have seen them sending threatening emails department wide, ignoring employee input that could lead to more productivity, obsessive monitoring of disabled employees while demanding more than they may be capable to meet ever tightening objectives, and more. On top of that they also sustained a culture that favored brown nosing in order to advance as opposed to being considered for what you were actually capable of. It was stessful to say the least.

Its not to say it is ALL bad, because there are some people who want to do good, but are just hamstrung by their superiors. I mean this place has SO MUCH POTENTIAL to be an innovative Silicon Valley type company for disabled people in the Capitol City area! It could be an oasis in a judgemental job market where many employers shun and de-value people with disabilities. Instead they have chosen to squander this opportunity to instead model themselves after corperate Fortune 500 companies who put productive first and employee well being last.

SHORT VERSION... do you just want to be treated like a number, make some money, and go home? Put in your application. What about be valued as an employee, be part of an innovative team, and enjoy your job? RUN. Run FAR far away from this place!

Worked for two+ years, promotions, cross-training, sacrificed weekends, wild schedule changes(Early second for two weeks, late second for a year, early first for a month, graveyard 6 months. Mind during this time I was expected to have perfect attendance with no time in between some switches. Even had to call out HR when i had 6 hours between a shift MORE THAN ONCE.), went very far outside of comfort zone to cover scheduling issues, grand total of a .50 cent raise. Lots of lies and broken promises. Upper management are a fools who have no idea how a company works and will cut you down to pad their paychecks. Supervisors and middle management who are located on the floor, try very hard to keep things running but upper management is bent on driving contracts into the ground. 
Love the people I work with on the same employment level, great bunch, very knowledgeable, would recommend asking the guy next to you before ever leaving your seat to ask a supervisor anything. Nothing like a sinking ship to pull teams together. Issue is extremely low moral, throwing more people on teams wont help the overworked supervisors, or wild call volume and scheduling requirements. 
Benefits are stellar, if your able to use them. The cry about being disability friendly but the minute you got FMLA, your black-balled. You WILL be passed over for promotions and advancements for not being, 'committed.'
Bottom line: DO NOT WASTE YOUR TIME.

Top Job Titles	Average Salary
Customer service representative 8 salaries reported	$19.13 per hour
Forklift operator 14 salaries reported	$20.29 per hour
Entry level customer service representative 11 salaries reported	$19.26 per hour
Service technician 15 salaries reported	$14.54 per hour
Material handler 5 salaries reported	$17.60 per hour

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