ILR Associate - Claims Associate -ILR State Farm Employee Review

The pace is breakneck and perpetual. I am never excited to get up in the morning and go to work. I dread my job because it involves trying to collect information quickly and accurately from distraught and aggressive customers, many of whom are still at an accident scene and have no information yet. I was recently asked by a friend, "what is your favorite part of the workday?" I thought, 'leaving,' and I realized I need to get a different job where I will have personal fulfillment. There is no autonomy to balance the responsibility in this position, as we follow the process dictated to the letter by management. Creativity is seen as deviation from the established process, and is discouraged. Most of our calls are recorded and reviewed against the department's document of requirements, and we receive our gradings based on a "achieved/coached" scale. One never knows which calls will be recorded, so one attempts to do their best on each call, but the call review department has an uncanny ability to pick the worst call in a stellar day to review (other employees on my team also have experienced this strange phenomenon). It truly gives you a warm-and-fuzzy feeling when a call reviewer in a different department grades you poorly because they don't think you sounded interested and excited during a call, or didn't use the customer's name or say 'thank you' more than three times during a ten-minute call. My most major and recent gripe is how management balances call volume and staffing: recently, we were in queue (back-to-back-to-back-to-back calls) for eight solid hours in a ten-hour day. (In and of itself, queue happens frequently in the department, but eight hours of queue is longer than average). This particular day, management approved the majority of our team to leave an hour early, even though we had been in queue for seven hours prior to that point. I was one of three people who stayed the full workday, out of a ten-person team. We were in queue when I left for the day, and we were still in queue when I came in the next day. When I mentioned to my manager that it was a frustrating situation, the manager told me that scheduling looks at forecasting and call volume projections. That ended the discussion. Change (packaged as progress) is highly valued in the company, and processes and procedures change even weekly. Not every change is beneficial to the employees in our department, and some changes even lengthen our process substantially, despite call average handle time expectations/goals remaining constant. The managers of our teams attend meetings with their manager, listen to our calls (sometimes), review our graded calls to make sure the reviewing department didn't miss anything, and inform us of our performance. The only time managers are on the phone is when they are scheduled to be on the escalation line (if a customer asks to speak with management), but the managers share that role on a rotating basis. The managers do not take calls, have never taken claim calls, and most of the managers have never even worked in the department they supervise. Theoretical knowledge of the position is not equal to ten-hours-a-day four-days-a-week experience talking on the phone and frequently absorbing customers' expletives. I've applied for positions outside of the department twice, and twice was declined. The interviewers simply told me, 'improve your interviewing skills.' The bottom line: if you're a noncreative person, willing to comply to ever-changing (and sometimes conflicting) expectations, like to work under micromanagment scrutiny, enjoy endless monotonous conversations with angry policyholders who don't understand your process and despise you for following your job, and you like working continuously with very slim advancement opportunities, this is the job for you.