Stay Away - Customer Care Representative State Farm Employee Review

Tipsord and the Senior VPs have really destroyed this once amazing company. My family worked here for 3 generations and it was a very safe, secure company to work for. Very consistent in day to day operations, and very effective in the insurance market. Very fair to their customers as well. Recently however Tipsord has taken a carpet-bomb style approach to everything. He recently ordered the firing of a large majority of senior employees, in an effort to save costs. To his credit, they were offered a fairly generous severance package, but it was labeled as "early retirement opportunities," which is just insulting. This is while their main corporate headquarters is undergoing a multi-million dollar renovation project, which is running over-schedule and over-budget, causing major disruptions to daily operations. Because of this there has been a massive brain-drain at the company, particularly in its IT departments. They are replacing 20 and 30 year veterans with kids fresh out of college. As smart as the younger employees are, there is a lot to be said for institutional memory. There's no way that a fresh hire can know and understand the operations at this company given how proprietary their operation is. I've heard from multiple sources that State Farm's IT dept does not follow industry standards or trends, and people that come in from other companies, or leave for other companies are confused by the way State Farm handles its IT infrastructure. In the call center where I worked, my manager was fantastic. It's the only reason the company gets more than 1 star. However we were largely constrained by the larger operational decisions. Customers would call in every day with complaints about claims not being paid, agents being uncooperative, and prices going sky-high without proper coverage increases to match. There was literally nothing we could do for them except send a message to their agent. This led to frustrated customers that would frequently become verbally and emotionally abusive to call-center employees. We had freedom to terminate these calls once they reached abusive status, but you can't unhear some of the things these people would say. The turnover in the department was sky-high despite adequate compensation (adequate, not great). The company is also currently chasing the fad of "metrics" by attaching a number to everything, even things which are better measured qualitatively than quantitatively. In the call center we were expected to keep our average call time under 5 minutes, have "wrap up" after the call lasting less than 50 seconds, and were only allowed "unscheduled absences" (bathroom breaks) totaling less than 3 minutes. We were strongly discouraged to have ANY unscheduled absences, which brings to mind Amazon workers peeing in jars so that they don't take a hit to their metrics. I regularly ran to the bathroom from my desk to avoid blowing this metric, and frequently found myself holding it for 2 hours or more. Second level assistance was very hit or miss. I began to learn the names of the helpful "escalation specialists" and dread the names of others. Some of them just plain don't know the proper procedures (which is a core part of their job description), and would get irate with us when we escalated calls per policy. I frequently had to read to escalation specialists the operating procedure on my screen to get them to take a call from me.