Worst job of all time - Claim Specialist State Farm Employee Review

⬤First of all, the training. The training was very long. 12 weeks total. The first few weeks are onboarding (filling out endless forms and HR training modules) and getting your license if you are in a licensed demand pool. Then it was about a month of all day zoom meetings which are part lecture and part doing modules on your own. It was tedious and boring, although sometimes they did try to make it engaging. Then they start you on working real claims. They do ease you into it which was nice. A few weeks where they manually assign you some simple claims, and then they move you onto "phones" (you take inbound phone calls for your demand pool, like a call center). The phone calls can be about literally anything, so it is really overwhelming. ⬤Throughout your days, you will be assigned to either "tasks" or "phones". "Phones" is taking inbound calls and "tasks" can be a number of things, but it is the other way around - you are getting into claims directly, working the claim to the farthest point, and then only making outbound calls as needed. Most people prefer being on tasks because it is less stressful and easier to rack up your metrics. ⬤After 12 weeks of training, you "go live". What they don't tell you in training is that you will be assigned on "phones" 90-100% of the time for the foreseeable future. ⬤You have NO control over your daily schedule. Everything is planned out for you, including when you take your lunch and your 15-minute breaks. It varies every day so don't expect to always take lunch at exactly 12pm. It could be 11am on Tuesday and 1pm on Wednesday. Sometimes the schedule changes with literally a few minutes notice and they switched you from tasks to phones or vice versa. ⬤It is like Big Brother, they track every minute of your activity and what's on your screen, if you go idle for 3 minutes they might be grilling you about it later. You need to try to "adhere" to your schedule as perfectly as possible because it's all tracked. Every day you get a spreadsheet and you can see your metrics (each highlighted in green, yellow, red for good/bad) compared to your peers. If you get wrapped up in a long phone call and can't take your break on time, that dings you. Of course it is much easier to have good "adherence" when you are on "tasks" and not stuck on "phones" all day. ⬤I absolutely hated being on phones. It is like Russian Roulette. Sometimes you get a pleasant easy call. Sometimes you get someone screaming at you because they're unhappy with the liability decision. Sometimes you get someone screaming at you because another adjuster dropped the ball and no one has touched their claim in weeks. Sometimes you are the "help desk" for CAs in Express, which they are not supposed to treat you as but they do it anyway. Even worse is when the CAs "cold transfer" calls that don't belong to you because they know it's going to be a difficult call and they are too lazy to deal with it. Then they back out of the claim real fast so they don't get caught. This happens EVERY day. ⬤A lot of CAs and ECRs (external claim resource, the independent contractors) are absolute imbeciles and they are a large part of why the CS Property-Complex job is a living hell. They mess up claims and you have to fix them. Don't get me wrong, a lot of CSs are not too bright either, so you will clean up their messes too. ⬤Generally, this job values quantity over quality. People who rush through claims to click as many tasks as possible will have better metrics than people who take their time to do the job right. People will literally steal tasks from others and not actually do any productive work in the claim, but they will be rewarded with "good metrics" on the spreadsheet. They are literally treating it like a game. This is sad because real customers' lives can be messed with due to poor claim handling, but it's happening constantly. ⬤If you want to take a vacation from all this madness, too bad. That PTO you accrued? You can't actually get it approved unless you plan 6 months in advance. There is a very convoluted and unfair PTO "bidding" system. I could write another novel. Do not ever consider becoming a claims adjuster for State Farm. Do not consider becoming a claims adjuster, period.