Thread regarding State Farm Insurance layoffs

No company anywhere expects the sales department to answer all the complaints, service calls, and billing questions. Well, no company except this one.

“Modernization” - integrate into private consumer info and sell, share and exploit it as much as possible. And call it Finance and insurance protocol. Shady data brokers in disguise. Pathetic industry making more than it a house at consumer expense.

Agents (and then their staff) are told by TC that they are the sales department. They receive no face to face training of any sort. They field virtually every customer outburst and complaint all day, every day. And ops employees who complain about their own workload expect agency folks to somehow, miraculously know every thing about every procedure in every department of State Farm. Things TC doesn’t expect them to do and doesn’t train them for.

Back when the bank was an actual thing, I cannot count the amount of times I had to tell agents or staff that I couldn't do something because it was straight up illegal, and they would argue with me about it.

Being from smaller lines in underwriting, I do have sympathy for team members. They get terrible training, very little of which we can require, and most of the time, they were really doing our applications for the first time. Call Centers would mix up information on our lines all the time. With all of the products we have, it really is difficult to keep the information straight (for both ATM and the call centers).

But I shouldn't need to be providing definitions of what a loss settlement option is on a consistent basis. Not answering clarifying questions, but definitions.

I had an agent, or agent team member claim I was aggressive on the phone and tried to make me sound like a woman abuser, all because I had to break the ice on a question for an answer they didn’t want to hear.

So I was called into my managers office, treated like basically a criminal. I asked for them to listen to the phone call that’s when I learned only x % of called are recorded. So it was my word, against a hysterical emotionally unstable person.

I was treated basically like dog cr-p until I left State Farm ever since that incident. I vowed to never work in traditional customer service again and determined customer service jobs are just for people to be walked all over on.

Yes, agent staff might be the only position worse than any claims/underwriting position. The pay is awful, you need to know everything, and you are basically making your agent wealthy while you struggle to buy clearance sale groceries.

Then you need to call claims or underwriting, and you get someone on the way out, improperly trained, or still thinking about the last call ect.

So agents get an attitude and call multiple times to see if they get different answers. Most of the issues are directly related to agent staff error or process failures, but then, this company doesnt want to do anything easy or simple, and seeks to complicate and restrict what everyone does and knows.

With that said, I've found agent staff to be generally the least knowledgeable group of people here. Many have the opposite attitude you would expect for this. Discussions with MOST (not all) agent staff is a very similar conversation you would have with an injured claimant whos never had an accident in 40 years, but his neighbor did 5 years ago, and now he knows way more than you do about insurance and claims.

Regardless. This company's pieces all work against each other, and its tiring. Underwritings agent facing roles have high turnover for a reason, and everyones dream in that department is to get to the non phone roles so they dont have to interact with AO staff anymore. That speaks volumes. Recognize that we have multiple tiers of "underwriting" that do not underwrite, but instead, exist to tell agent staff how to properly read their process guides, and explain to them, what they did wrong and why. We shouldnt need that.

I hate to generalize but yes Agent's Staff do call a lot for trivial things the already know or should know since they sell policies and this doesn't help the already long hold times in claims

don't get me wrong, there are some good people at AOs but I get the feeling most of their newer staff get subpar training and use claims to as their crutch, lately they call about things we don't even have anything to do with such as underwriting or better yet policy questions the should know the answer to(like rental limits) and then they get mad when we tell them they waited on hold for 30 minutes for nothing.

Also, the complete refusal (especially in modernization) to learn ANYTHING about the new system is pathetic. But hey, job security I guess.