Farmers Group Reviews

Pros

excellent training program, excellent management support, company ability to treat everyone fair,
beautiful building, every opportunity to succeed. Job takes lots of hard work and a lot of time to build your business. Supplied all the literature you needed.

Cons

I felt Expectations of sales quota's were high for new agents. Expecially during the holiday season.
After checking around they were fare.

Advice to Senior Management

Please lower beginning sales quotas so you can keep quality people on board. This was a wonderful place to work.

Pros

The collegial atmosphere is wonderful, and there is a strong focus on doing things right. Flexible hours allow you to balance your work/home responsibilites. Very stable until recently.

Cons

Recent layoffs have really hurt morale. Not a lot of upward opportunities, as lots of senior supervisors have been with the company a long time. When senior positions do open up, they tend to hire from the outside rather than promote from within. IT is not up to industry standards, and the layoffs hit that department really hard. And the IT help desk seems to be in India - huh?

Advice to Senior Management

Manage this company as a long-term enterprise, because it is. Bring IT into the 21st century. Line up words and actions on things like change initiatives.

Pros

profit sharing used to be good.

Cons

routine work, not much change or challenege

Advice to Senior Management

provide challenging opportunities for smarter workers

Pros

The people, supervisors and managers are all great. There is a lot of growth potential especially if you work hard. I received my first promotion in less than a year of working at Farmers. You get 20 days of vacation a year. They have a tuition reimbursement program that is also very nice.

Cons

It can be difficult to work in a call center, and we are always very busy. Sometimes it seems that we are very micro-managed.

Pros

Good Pay Good People There is the normal amount of favoritsm with the in clique

Cons

Management intersted only in covering themselves and will leave employees out to dry

Pros

They try to keep the work environment light, but then micro-manage. Decent pay. Really nice co-workers, but it's losing it's "family" feeling.

Cons

Narrow growth opportunities and a huge "cliche" environment. You're either in favor or WAY out. Pretty harsh treatment for feedback and inconsistent in methods and choices for promotion.

Advice to Senior Management

It would help if product management really knew what was going on out in the marketplace and especially with their own agents. There is a real disconnect there.

Pros

Ability to create own destiny

Cons

High goal expectations, need to set realistic goals

Advice to Senior Management

Set realistic sales goals

Pros

Farmers has tremendous opportunities for those truly interested in the claims operations.

Cons

Farmers does not embrace change unless mandated by government entities which makes them a company that's less agile than others in their industry.

Pros

The pay was good and the trainers were very nice. Other than that, not much was worth a pro comment.

Cons

While the trainers were nice it didn't feel like you got the training you needed. When they put you on the floor to handle actual claims by people with real problems you had no idea what you were doing. There was nobody to talk to about this except for the people working beside you and they are normally busy. My supervisor was a jerk who was never at his desk so you could talk to him about problems handling claims.

Also not for the highly stressed people as you will be cussed out numerous times from the people with their claims.

Advice to Senior Management

Maybe some more thorough training would be nice. And then a better way of introducing people onto the floor so you are not overwhelmed from the get go.

Pros

Lots of locations, benefits are good (401K with company contribution, high ded medical plan, annual bonus based on personal performance and company performane).

Cons

Slow to change, process of integration of purchased units is a disorganized and unstructured process. Management attempts to do the right thing, but does not know how to execute.

Advice to Senior Management

Listen to your teams, the distance of the senior team from the line is too great. People "on the ground" can assist you greatly, however you must listen and act.