Pros
Member before I was an employee, I still strongly believe in the mission - USAA is hands-down the best financial security company in the world, and seriously goes out of their way for the members 8% 401k match, approximately 5k in tuition money Almost all of the happiness with the job comes purely from the overall mission, but it can be difficult to focus on serving the members when over-worked, stressed, and not recognized (more below)
Cons
Referrals/sales. These have become the most important stat for any employee. They are weighed the heaviest in all performance evaluation (in two of the major categories - call quality and business results) It seems to me that the most important factor in evaluating a customer service representative should be the member's rating of their service. If the member rates you a 5 (or 10 as it now is) and yet you failed to convince them to buy a new product, you're rated lower. Performance evaluation is very gray and very subjective. Managers have these areas in which they comment on your performance/results, Below expectations, Partially met, met, exceeds, and far exceeds. An outside observer might expect this sounds an awful lot like a bell curve. This is most definitely not the case. Instead it's more like 75% ME, 20% PM, and 5% BE/EE. USAA's internal hire/transfer climate is so competitive, If you want to go any other department or move up in the company, everyone knows you need that EE rating. Managers will dangle it like a carrot but always find some reason not to reward you. They have endless stats analyzing the most minute of details about your activities and performance on the phone – do well in one area and they can just dig deeper and question you on why you didn’t magically do work list while we had back-to-back calls all day every day, or why some random number that you didn’t even know existed is out of line with peer average. They can even “live observe” you (they sit at their computer and watch everything you do on your computer and hear everything you say, doing this all day until they can call you out on something). If you really dig on someone, you can find something wrong with anyone. An employee can open Facebook on break and if someone on their page cussed, they can get fired for inappropriate usage of the computer. If someone calls in and asks for insurance cards to be faxed to the DMV you can get in trouble for not saying a ridiculous “setup” such as “In order to ensure I’m understanding your financial situation I’ll be asking you some questions through out the call.. so what has you calling in needing insurance cards today?” I wish I had concrete numbers, but personal observation of turnover would be roughly 50% within first year or two, and 90% within 5 years. Yet somehow they claim <5%. My guess would be that to avoid reporting it, they don’t count anyone on any form of corrective action (which, like I stated earlier, a manager can find something wrong with anyone, and if an employee is already feeling overworked and stressed the added stress of possibly losing your job can make someone leave in a hurry to avoid having to say they were fired) I don't think it's because the executives are greedy and money-hungry. Maybe I am still naïve, but I bet General Robles really does believe the things he is saying during the employee meetings. I believe they only want valid referrals, not a referral on every call as we’re expected, I’d expect they don’t really want us over-worked as we are, but despite hiring like crazy the last two years, we lost so many of those new employees and they’re hiring less and less, I’m guessing with the catastrophes that hit recently they don’t want to spend anymore, so they’re instead looking to be more totalitarian with our jobs(if you go to break 15 minutes later than scheduled your manager/director are e-mailed). But something is being missed as it transfers down the chain of command. With the climate being so competitive, representatives are all working themselves to exhaustion trying to get every detail well above “peer average” in the futile attempt to get “EE” to move up (thereby driving up averages in every category), managers want to get promoted and make a name for themselves, so they demand more and more of their representatives (nitpicking every minute detail to demand more and more of those that want to succeed at USAA, forcing out those that can’t keep up). I don’t believe the corporate climate has shifted to greed, I just think it’s a result of all the competition and everyone trying to look better than their peers. The end result of all of this is stressed, over-worked employees, and USAA is losing all of the good ones to other companies, the service-oriented employees are leaving because they’re tired of the sales-oriented measurements, and members are suffering with poorly trained reps because the skilled and experienced ones are leaving within 5 years. Members need to be aware that employees can’t say or do anything about all of this, we don’t have a confidential HR that we can just ask questions to for advice, managers do these evaluations/corrective actions and employees don’t know anything about how the processes work or what their rights are and have no one to complain to. We’re told to take it up the chain of command - why would we cast ourselves in further bad light by talking to our manager/director about how we’re upset?