State Farm Reviews

Pros

State Farm has good benefits and good people. There is an extensive training program.

Advice to Management

Listen to your front line employees-- the people actually doing the job. We are smart people and know what we are doing. We understand it costs the company money when our call times are 30 seconds longer than average. We understand that it means more people need to be on the phone. However, what management doesn't seem to understand is how frustrated the employees AND customers are with being rushed through the claim process. State Farm will more than make up for the handful of extra employees required to be on the phones by retaining more State Farm customers, making new customers with excellent customer service to claimants, and not having to retrain new associates when frustrated associates leave.

Pros

An attractive major medical healthcare package.
Tuition reimbursement after one year of employment, with qualifying grades.
Employee discount program, local and US.

Advice to Management

Reorganization and reduction of has occurred at the incorrect level across multiple departments. We've paid multiple third party vendors millions of policyholder dollars to tell us what we already knew about OUR business, implement changes that were not to the benefit of OUR customers (remember those MUTUAL policyholders - the ones, who in theory, own our business??)

Training is poor, skill sets have been reduced to glorified phone operators, management oversees metrics - not quality driven, customer centric service and deliverables. New departments exist purely to be proud of the paper they produce. Yet, VPOs and OVPs are amazed we continue to lose market share.... that JD Power scores are failing.... customer complaints are soaring.... attrition and termination rates are at an all time high. Morale is plummeting daily, alongside Agent and customer confidence.

Pros

Name recognition of State Farm is massive, and it's a trusted brand. It's a large and very stable company that is very conservative financially. I have no doubt that they really know how to manage investments and their money (they've done just that for 95+years now).

If you're in Bloomington, IL (the HQ) your pay will be good given the cost of living there. It *will* be less than any place on the coasts, but again COL is so much less. If you're in other locations pay is only somewhat competitive.

Of course the pension + 401k is a big hook for many, and it vests after 5 years, but to get any real value from the pension you need to work here 15+ years.... and that's exactly what most people here do.

The other benefits here are good at least competitive with most companies. except we don't do the kinds of perks that most tech companies provide in terms of free food. The health insurance is Blue Cross Blue Shield and what we pay isn't massive. Rx co-pays are ok. If you choose a high deductible plan they'll throw $2k into a medical savings account that's use-it-or-lose-it each year but it covers a nice chunk of any medical care you may have during the first part of the year.

The pace is is slower than most. Not that your workload won't be fairly high, but things are slow moving. People don't work long hours (unless they really like that kind of thing). It's a ghost town past 4:30 here (we work 8-4:15), and working the weekend is unheard of unless you're an part of the crew doing a release.

The fringe benefits of working at SF and living in Bloomington, IL are pretty good if you have kids. They have SF Park that has a pool and mini-golf and sports courts galore as well as discount programs with local and national retailers.

Work related stress is only as high as you let it be 95% of the time. There's very little environmental stress with the exception of the frustration and lack of hope in people's eyes you see when things fail to release or release quickly.

Once you get in here, you'll never have to leave. Getting fired is next to impossible unless you break the law. If you're looking for someplace to land and then stay until retirement this is your place. I've had a few colleagues who've retired here who came for the last 10-15 years of their career and it worked out for them rather well. That's a pro for the person, but not for the company :).

Advice to Management

Here's something simple: remove the need for employees to log in to their web browsers. That's just a ridiculous waste of time multiple times day. 1-5 seconds wasted hundreds of thousands/day by employees adds up fast. Same thing with the extra checkbox to get into a Skype meeting as well as the extra click to get onto the VPN. It's all a needless waste of time that virtually no other company does.

Another quick fix: get a real social platform for internal collaboration (not the current SharePoint-based ridiculousness.. isn't Yammer still free for companies?).

If they were to go radical change, I'd say hire more, a lot more, outside people for VP and higher positions as well as for other key technical and digital/UX positions to replace the people we have there now. Give many/most of the those people the typical golden parachute and/or offer early retirement benefits (i.e. they can start drawing on the pension at an earlier age and bump their years of service).

A more moderate (though still major) change would be create a new technical system that could handle most/all our policy/payment/claims/internal systems and then find a cut-over date where all new transactions/policies are on the new system along with a ton of training for people to just continually apologize if there's any kind of delay or problem when a rep goes to help them because they have to search/use or use two different systems. Within 1 year of pain all policies with just a few exceptions (very small %, though large in terms of absolute numbers) will be onto the new system. Band-aids can only be added on band-aids for so many layers before it's all just one big band-aid that will eventually crap out.

Legal clearly plays a major role in an insurance company, I'm not saying it shouldn't. Policies are contracts and litigation is simply a part of doing business in this industry. That said, legal carries way too much organizational power here. Legal and executives should clearly communicate openly that legal advice is ADVICE, a recommendation that quite often doesn't have to be followed exactly. Legal needs to get better at being clear when what advice they give is them trying their very best to protect the company by being conservative, and what would automatically land us in trouble with a lawsuit or the government. They need to communicate openly on every level that when they render advice the department asking the question or making the request ultimately has decision power on the action. They also need to make it clearer and easier for their decisions/actions/recommendations to be viewed inside the company so that we don't end up with people spreading rumors about what is/is not allowed or recommended because we end up with people saying things with the voice of legal who really are just spreading their own misinterpretation of the situation.

Pros

Health Insurance, 401k matched up to $900/year, dental, vision, life included in benefits package.

Advice to Management

Listen to your employees. Look around, see how unhappy we are. Take feedback, treat us like human beings. The way you treat your employees is the way your employees will treat customers. Stop caring about how many claims we touch in an hour, if there is no quality behind the quantity, then it doesn't matter. Focus on customer service and being Remarkable, focus on positivity. Reward employees who do well. Micromanagement is never affective. Leadership needs to learn to lead, not manage. Lead us to become great for our customers, lead us to be caring representatives of State Farm. Don't manage us to have green numbers on a board. I started at State Farm about 5 years ago, I was trained on how to empathize, how to talk to customers, how to treat customers like human beings. I was surrounded by people excited about this company. Now I am surrounded by people looking down on everyone lower on the totem poll. I am surrounded by numbers and robots disguised as employees. If I get into an accident, my manager doesn't ask if I am okay. They tell me I am getting points for being late. If you treat me like a number, why wouldn't I treat the customers like a number? Treat your employees like you would like your customers to be treated.

Pros

The people is the best part. Helping customers both internal and exterior. Not fast paced but constant pace.

Advice to Management

Be more open minded with some policies.

Pros

It is a Competitive environment to work in.

Pros

I joined State Farm because of it's commitment to customers and employees. Through many changes I have never been let down and worked with excellent leadership who genuinely care about the livelihood of their employees. There is a great diversity of opportunity to get involved in many aspects of the company and there is a willingness to help you to develop in the role rather than needing all the technical knowledge up front.

Pros

-All inbound calls, so no cold calling.
-Ability to make commission
-Very flexible Scheduling System

Pros

Great company to work, they have really good benefits for employees!! Up front tuition reimbursement, great pay, great health benefits. In general State Farm cares about their employees.

Pros

Relaxed environment and great boss