In my opinion, not a better PEO
January 08, 2025
In my opinion, not a better PEO
Score 1 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Overall Satisfaction with TriNet
We use TriNet for PEO services - payroll, benefits, 401K (with Empower), and HR. Our team is entirely remote and spread across several states and TriNet seemed like a solution to these needs. We switched from one of their competitors to TriNet at the beginning of the year. The onboarding session did not go smoothly, as, in our experience, the sales and implementation teams made promises that they could not keep and just outright made mistakes. Most notably was promising us early access to the portal and then not granting it and one of our employees was unable to register due to some unknown glitch in their system. This took a week to resolve with the employee and I having to be on several calls with TriNet's backend engineers until someone figured out the coding issues that were not allowing our employee to sign up. This was only the beginning of the issues that we have had with TriNet in our first year with them.
Pros
- in our experience, make a mess of payroll taxes
- in my opinion, ignore customer's emails
- in my experience, give canned responses on their chat line
Cons
- onboarding/implementation - in my experience, don't make promises and then break them. Fix the platform so that all new hires can onboard. We experienced one employee not being able to sign up at all and then another whose vacation hours did not load.
- payroll taxes - in my opinion, do not tell the client that everything is good and you have all the necessary paperwork to process payroll taxes if this is not the case! Communicate with the client that something is missing in the beginning and not 11 months later. In my opinion, once the client has granted TPA access, prioritize the back filings and payments instead of ignoring the client for over a month (or longer, since we still have not heard back from TriNet).
- customer service - in my opinion, have knowledgeable employees who are empowered to assist clients available on the phone and chat lines. In my experience, I have had more responsive and helpful AI bots assist me than the TriNet employees currently being used.
- TriNet negatively impacted our payroll by not filing and remitting unemployment reports/taxes.
- TriNet has increased time spent on HR and payroll tasks for us due to the, in my opinion, poor set up of their platform. It took over a month to have an additional vacation plan added for an employee and nearly two weeks to have a new hire's vacation front loaded. This happened near the holidays when people needed to request vacation time.
- TriNet promised us savings on admin fees, but then announced mid year that they were going to charge a $1,000 "platform fee"
Both Insperity and TriNet have failed us in the same and different ways. Justworks was initially more expensive for benefits than TriNet. However, TriNet's benefits renewed with an average 10% increase, so we did not see savings for very long. If we could just be free of a PEO, that would be the next step, as none of the larger ones have been worth the cost for the problems they created or did not solve for us.
Do you think TriNet delivers good value for the price?
No
Are you happy with TriNet's feature set?
No
Did TriNet live up to sales and marketing promises?
No
Did implementation of TriNet go as expected?
No
Would you buy TriNet again?
No
Comments
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