This company seems to have lost its way - Auto Claims Specialist State Farm Employee Review

The wonderful company culture died a very ugly death under the heading of cost savings with the new CEO who manages this mutual company as though it's a publicly traded stock company. They apply only bottom line mentality to many decisions that lack any logic in terms of what the customer expects. The tenured employees used to be seen as the company's greatest asset, but now they are clearly the greatest liability. The company is moving towards having all their employees working in brand new state of the art buildings located only in major metropolitan areas. The obvious downside is all the tenured employees aren't there, and are being laid off in favor of cheaper new hire replacements. The irony here is that the new hires cant maintain the workloads, so the company brings in hundreds of external independent contractors at different times per year...and they pay them far more than the tenured employees that are being forced out the door. You can only image the lack of care a temporary employee has to do the right things to satisfy a customer. What seems to have been overlooked is that happy employees make for happy customers. While the job is considered "professional", there is nothing actually professional about it. You work undesireable shifts, can't get time off, you're micro-managed beyond belief, you're day is scheduled to the minute for the entire time you're in the building, etc. If you have an unexpected sick child, or become unexpectedly ill yourself, you do have PTO available, but you will be penalized for using it. You get several "points" against you for each day you're unexpectedly sick, or have an unexpectedly sick kid. Once you receive 20 points...you are fired. That means people come to work sick and make everyone else sick as well. Now that employees are so miserable in "the new model", they no longer exercise the same care and dedication towards satisying a great customer base. In fact, employees are now measured purely by "call center" metrics, which capture how many widgets you produced (number of calls answered per hour and number of tasks completed). As any logical person would surmise, this creates the mentality of doing only the bare minimum in order for it to count toward your metric. This is in direct conflict with satisying customers who don't want to speak to someone that only cares about their hourly counts. They want someone that won't be penalized for providing great service (which takes a little longer). Afterall, that is why the customer pays for extra to be insured with State Farm. For these reasons, the wonderful employees that created what used to be a great company are leaving in droves! It seemed almost as if they were being encouraged to leave so they could be replaced with new hires that dont cost as much. The saddest part is that many new hires only stay long enough to get through training. They quit long before they are valuable contributors because the working environment is so awful. The job itself has a rather significant learning curve in order to be effective. This used to be company where you could have a "career", but now you can only hope for a "job" that lasts as long as you can reasonably tolerate it. As such, the awful employee attrition rates paint a clear picture of why so many customers are also taking their business elsewhere. State Farm used to be a company that admittedly cost a little bit more than the competition. They owned that fact, but were ok with it under the reasoning that their service was so much better than the competition. They have now evolved (declined , actually) to a company that is still more expensive than the competition, and the service they provide is only marginal at best when compared its competitors. Customers and employees have rapidly lost confidence in this company that was once so great. It looks like the almighty dollar has won this contest. I sure wish they would realize how they trip over dollars to pick up dimes. I ultimately decided to take my career, and my numerous insurance policies, elsewhere. I couldn't bear the thought of subjecting myself to their poor claim service if I ever really needed their help recovering from the unexpected. It's quite sad to see how far they've deviated from all the things that once made them great. I'm sure the companies founder, G.J., is rolling over in his grave because his company has become all the things he set out to avoid.