outside sales representative

sales specialist

direct sales representative

field sales representative

customer care specialist

Windstream

Very disorganized, unrealistic quota system based on extremely unreliable data. They do vacation bidding for your annual time and then don’t bother to approve it, they make you take sick days 3 weeks in advance and give you points for taking actual sick days. They talk you up about a fast paced sales environment and put you in a special call queue in training and then when they put you on your actual team it is radio silent. The quota is 30 sales and only 10 out of 88 consultants hit this goal and they are from Georgia where the company is based. This is extremely slow and they know this and will absolutely hold you accountable and tell you to “control your controllables”. They will write you up for not making quota and you will never hit it if you are not in a tier 3 market. They expect you to host events which is great, but deny them, they did this to me and LIED about it and thankfully my marketing team had proof they did this. I can’t even take time off for doctors appointments bc they will not approve days. It is a toxic environment, and the administration is very rude. It is also a massive pit of misinformation and miscommunication. Rules change on a whim without properly informing everyone and they have a horrible customer service tactic. You are in competition with Inside Sales and Door to Door agents who have access to a high volume queue they will not allow you in, and those agents take all the sales from the area you have been assigned to. The community connections is a wasted job that they have attempted to convert after closing their store fronts and it is failing miserably and they chose to blame and fire great employees instead of addressing their poor management. It’s an actual joke of a job and it is sad to see a job that could be so rewarding to be wasted in a horrible environment like this. They tell you they see your hard work and will hand you a final warning for lack of performance within the same day. The turnover rate is extremely high, our team started with 14 and has 4 people and they can’t keep a team built because they lose them faster than they can hire them on. They also have no clear track for advancing to higher positions with this job. I could continue with how horrible this job experience has been, but the point is clear. Do not waste valuable time and go find a company that values it’s customers and employees, this job does NOT care one single bit about either. They have no clue what they are doing at any given time and expect you to have it together for them.

The account manager role was good, I used to look forward to going to work (as did others) but 1 year ago this last March things changed. The environment was changed to a call center, the pay was cut drastically, the lunch hour went to a lunch half hour and many times lunch and breaks are cancelled. When this happens the company typically buys everyone pizza so we don't leave our desk's and keep taking call after call. 3 seconds after the last call we get another and so on and so forth. Now, on the good days when we get breaks and lunches, any and all bathroom breaks are deducted from the breaks and or lunch.     It takes 25 different computer systems (not exagerating) to do our job and partly because registration keys don't want to be invested in. So each and every key stroke has to be manually tracked by the employee that is getting a new call every 3 seconds. The lies the employees are being told to tell the customers are rediculous. And since every call is to be "1 call resolution" and we are supposed to get each customer on and off the line as quickly as possible without sacrificing the call quality is entirely a joke. Well that's the Typical Day! 

Now, MANAGEMENT, or I should and will say MICRO MANAGEMENT. Have NO RESPECT for the employees and work them to death, don't care that they have families and emergencies that arise and are so ready to jump to invoke an "occurance" against the employee for being 1 minute late, or having to take child to ER or if the dog is sick or what have you.

Regarding CO-WORKERS, most of them have left the company for other positions at other employee friendly business that pay a decent wage. Oh, on a positive note I did receive a 1% merit raise this year. Just their idea of another joke.

The HARDEST PART OF THE JOB is going to that Maitland office 5 days a week, but I must say they are hiring people off the street because people from within know better. So, just imagine you get hired to learn a new job, possibly don't get breaks or lunches, are expected to work mandatory overtime and you get to learn 25 computer systems. A training class usually consists of approximately 15 people, 3-4 of the people usually make it to the floor.

The MOST ENJOYABLE part of the job is still trying to be identified by the remaining tenured employees. So come on apply for a retention job in the Maitland FL office with WINDSTREAM.

I worked for EarthLink,  which was bought by Windstream, for over 12 years. Windstream has very poor management and seems to have no direction as far as integrating the multitude of telecoms that it has acquired over the years.  Management offers no support and is not receptive to ideas to improve the customer experience. Employees are tasked with working to resolve customer troubles often with no training and even more often,  no access to the systems required to resolve a customer's issue. Management just tries to survive the day instead of working on making processes more efficient. Reaching out to management for assistance or direction is futile. There are numerous members of management within the repair department who have zero technical knowledge and no desire to assist employees. Most customers regret their decision to use Windstream shortly after their service begins. There is no assistance from management with prioritizing customer troubles. A technician will often be tasked with working, for example,  a DSL customer trouble who may bill $150/month while also working a customer trouble on a Metro E circuit with multiple locations who bills $25,000/month or more.  If the DSL customer is very vocal then they get priority.  It's not surprising that Windstream filed for bankruptcy a few years back.
Pay is decent 
Health insurance is expensive and not good at all,  especially for a company the size of Windstream. 
Vacation/PTO is a bright spot. I had @ 5 weeks of PTO/Sick time along with 7 paid holidays 
The coworkers are by far the best part of Windstream but morale has been in a freefall since the company became Windstream. 
Job security is not good.  There are frequent layoffs and affected employees are not offered other open positions within the company.  They will lay off employees with vast experience who often are the only people who knew how to work on or had access to a particular system.  No rhyme or reason at all.
It's a job and not a career.  If you don't mind lying to customers or getting screamed at often because you are unable to help them out,  you may be okay.  For people with pride and a conscious,  you will dread work every day!

Windstream is an ironic company, hence the title. This company is a giant machine with many MANY moving parts, groups, divisions, a lot of people that sit behind a desk and move jobs and click boxes. Nothing moves quickly and nothing is efficient, and none of the groups communicate with each other nearly enough. They all have their own way of doing things too so I get caught in the crossfire between groups way too often. As an engineer, in my role I have contact with my manager and some of the other engineers, but there have been many situations when nobody informs me about this or that and it leads to a mishap or mistake. It happens to all of us. It seems like all upper management cares about is the money and big contracts and big fiber builds, and they won't put any concern for anything else. I've seen multiple times I push something up the ladder and it never comes back to me because upper management didn't take care of it and it turned into a much larger problem than it needed to be. Upper management doesn't communicate with anyone and training is unfocused, disorganized and slow. I am still not sure what my job is supposed to entail because nobody will give me a straight and clear answer and suddenly my job responsibilities widen without notice and often, and nobody trains me on how to do the new things I'm supposed to be doing, I have to train myself and more likely mess it up. Frustrating to get good at this job, leads me to dread it a little bit. It feels like I'm learning how things should be, and I never get the chance to really innovate or be creaitve with my work, it's just learn the nuances of how things work and never change it. workmates are great though, it's just they also didn't get trained properly so I get a bunch of opinions instead of the straight answer about something. 

By the way, this is how if you notice all the poles around wherever you live are all messed up because of poor management and people ill trained like me :)




Windstream is without a doubt the worst job I've had in over 20 years of employment. The training is irrelevant to the day to day tasks associated with the job. The company itself makes the job more difficult than it should be with way too many different systems and procedures associated with each system. There is little to no communication as far as simple things like how to do certain daily job actions,  training and basic information for new hires like payroll, pay schedule and just the minor things most companies provide to new employees. The workers there are all nice hard working people but if you ask 5 people the same question you will get 5 different answers because there is no set structure or set way to do things. I was surprised how many long tenured  people there did not actually know how to do certain things,  thats not an employee problem thats an organizational problem. They basically throw you on the floor with very little relevant training and do not provide a good nurturing environment to help you succeed. I went over 6 months without access to a very common system used for customer assistance, then an additional 2 months without access to a vital system for every day production...what other company would allow that?  How can i give good service to a customer if i cant even access there account and the only information i ever received when asking for it to be fixed was someone will contact you...well they never did and for 2 months i sat taking calls without the simple ability to help the customer. The work atmosphere was good, good people laid back environment but the systems, procedures and communication are the worst I've ever experienced at any company big or small.  You could not pay me to work for Windstream again.

I am a current employee for this company as a construction tech. and there are a few things I’ve observed over my time with windstream. We’ll start with the good. First off, the pay and benefits are very good. Better than most places in our area and pretty good compensation for the industry. We have all new equipment. Depending on who you are, we do travel some and make good money doing so and enjoy the experiences that come with it. The work in itself is not bad. Now onto the bad. Management needs to improve on communication. We have a very hard time communicating with our management and in some areas (such as ours) management is hours away and we depend on being able to communicate with them and unfortunately, we have issues being on the same page due to the lack of communication. Now I mentioned we have new equipment but in our shop for example, we don’t have the man power to operate everything. Instead of hiring more workers to fill those voids, other shops take equipment from other yards with no warning. Training is very minimal. You get 2 weeks of dedicated hands on training in climbing school and if your lucky a week of splicing school ( don’t really learn much there). All other training is done through computer based training but given the demand of the job, time to complete this training is very hard to come by. Overall, if you’re someone who has experience and already have an understanding of how to do the job and how things are supposed to be and don’t need a ton of direction, this place isn’t all that bad if you can deal with the politics of it. If you’re someone who is looking to get into the industry as a telecom construction person, I would not recommend as you need as much training as you can to gain experience and unfortunately you won’t get this from here if you don’t work along guys with experience.

The company itself changes so much so fast with little overhead. When I was first hired with the company we were told we were not doing sales. But the first week on the floor, we started doing contract sales.

The Management itself tries to help, and are caring. But largely ineffectual. Nothing changes for the benefit of the common worker. CEOs, and higher management changes every 3 months and with it new sets of rules and guidelines. And get huge pay upgrades, while we get more and more work with no pay increase.

The work requires much time to do because of the nature of how Windstream has it's systems all different and all need different passwords, logins, and how all of it doesn't interact with one another. We deal with 5 billing platforms that all require different sets of systems, and logins all of which look and tell different things. Normally this isn't an issue if it's a singular platform, but it's 5 platforms. But you don't have that time to do it, and much of it done after the call, but you are subject to the same time constraints as normal call center which are normally one and dones. Which sets you up for a PIP. Because in order to met the expectations of  what is required of you, requires you to basically go on a PIP with the recent changes.

And even if you get promoted to another team. This does not save you from being layed off. As I know quite a few co-workers whom I liked get layed off only months into their new postions, and get walked out.

The culture tries to foster it's people for success, but with large layoffs such as myself constantly happening every quarter. You wonder when you are next on the chopping block through no fault of your own.

Overall, it's ok to work, but don't expect to stay long or get promoted. Benefits are terrible, pay is decent, and management is ok.

Micro-managed even when your hitting your numbers. Atmosphere in the office was dismal.

Great products - extremely poor Operations. When you sold something, it took forever to get it installed and keep the services up and running.

Everything was a challenge, from getting assistance in getting an order through the Operations process to getting paid. Everything required a Kitana ticket to request that something needed to be corrected/fixed when it should have been done in the first place.

With being in Sales, I thought my job was to identify a Customer's challenges and sell them the products that would be of assistance with those challenges. At Windstream, not only are you Micro-managed to find the Prospects and make the Sales but then you were expected to fight through every stage of trying to get your order through the Windstream process and you were still expected to exceed your quota every month.

It got to the point where I was embarrassed for not only making excuses to the Customers I had already sold because of delays in installations or problems after installation, but I lost motivation in selling to new Prospects due to the fact that I lost confidence in selling the Windstream products.

Direct Manager knew nothing, didn't know systems, was a horrible Coach and Manager, didn't know procedures, was an embarrassment when taking him on appointments.

If you are considering Windstream, please pay attention to the negative reviews as well, they do have merit. I was not terminated, I resigned my position because I had enough.

I took the time to write this review to let you know my experiences with Windstream. I wish I would have looked into this company much deeper before I accepted their offer. I've learned my lesson. I hope this helps.

A typical workday at Windstream from start to finish is an extremely high paced environment. You need to have very refined organizational skills and the ability to multitask or you will struggle to be successful.
  The employees at Windstream are typically hard working and dedicated as well as friendly and helpful. If you fit the mold of the people described above you should have relatively good job security. Unfortunately a lot of individuals struggle with these concepts which accounts for the high rate of turnover. 
  There are a lot of different managers at Windstream so it is tough to categorize all of them with a few descriptive words. However I will say out of the three different managers I have worked under during my tenure at Windstream all of them have been pleasant and willing to help with any issue I have presented to them. 
  The most difficult part about working at Windstream is the constant changing that takes place. You have to be an extremely flexible individual to be able to handle the fact that you never really are able to get comfortable at your job. To be more specific you can expect policies, shifts, computer systems and programs, as well as management to change if you are employed with them for any significant period of time.
  The most enjoyable part about my job is my conversations with my customers. I really get a feeling of self fulfillment when I am speaking with a customer and able to identify his/her needs and am able to recommend a product or service that will allow that individual to run their business more effectively and efficiently.

Windstream can be a very good place to work if you stay on top of things.  But be mindful that every minute of your day is tracked, recorded digitally, and made into a metric that is used all the time for various purposes.  You get two 15 minute breaks and one 30 or 60 minute lunch break.  Including your initial clock-in time, that's four opportunities per day that you can get dinged if you are late.  For each instance, you have a buffer of 3 minutes.  But go over that by one second and you get a 1/4 point. If you get 8 points, you're fired.  So there are 4 chances per day to get points.  You are also expected to take calls and get off the phone within about 11 minutes regardless of how difficult the caller's problem is.  If you go beyond the established threshold too many times, you will get "coached".  Get too many coachings and you will be refused raises (even if you are getting extraordinarily difficult things fixed/done).  Don't meet any number of metrics and you get coached.  Get coached enough times and you get fired.  So if you are "detail oriented" and "customer focused" too much, you may not last here.  But if you are sharp and fast and can handle draconian micro-management, it can be a good place to build up your 401k for retirement.  Some people don't last beyond the first week once they find out how things are at Windstream.  Others won't make it within their first 90 days.  But if you do, it can turn into a consistent paycheck every two weeks for you.  The people are generally very good.  But the policies are very much "no nonsense" and they will hold you to them. 

Top Job Titles	Average Salary
Outside sales representative 4 salaries reported	$71,100 per year
Sales specialist 40 salaries reported	$88,438 per year
Direct sales representative 3 salaries reported	$78,333 per year
Field sales representative 25 salaries reported	$79,028 per year
Customer care specialist 11 salaries reported	$500 per week

Working at Uniti: Company Overview and Reviews

Uniti

Uniti Ratings

Popular jobs at Uniti

Salary Satisfaction

Job Seeker Tools

Employer Tools

Browse

Stay Connected