Thread regarding State Farm Insurance layoffs

I just looked out my office window, Downtown Fire Building across the street has not had State Farm letters stripped off.

I had agents offices incorrectly explaining towing coverage, telling the customer to have the vehicle towed as far as they wanted, such as to home when the vehicle broke down in another state meaning we owned for a $600.00 + tow as the agents office incorrectly explained what State Farm would cover, they incorrectly explained the claims process, bothered claims about the status of a ton of claims all at one time/same call from agents office when a customer was not calling for status, so instead of helping a customer with an active claim we wasted time with the agents office because they were trying to look good, then when you explained that, they lied to management about what was said. Liars!!!!!

A nearly 100 million, non-essential expense, is worthy of conversation and discussion.

Another reason: in the past, production and sales go up after the convention. Simple as that.

If you’re jealous of our agency perks, the solution is simple: become an agent.

No other insurance company has the agent set up like we do. And the prior post that referenced other businesses that pay incentives for sales production those companies can pass those costs onto the consumer by increasing the price of their product. You can’t always do that with insurance. there are Statutory regulations and difficult state governments to deal with that often times prevent us from a rate increase. Plus if we raise the rates too high sales will go down. So although our agents really impact our underwriting bottom line I don’t think they should be completely eliminated from the business model. But who knows what will happen we’ll just have to wait and see.

I spent a lot of years in Operations, and a lot of years in Agency. I can say without any doubt that Agency is much, much harder and much less secure than Operations. Those "huge commissions" are not what you think. For one, they are 1/3 lower than they were just over 20 years ago. The vast majority of agents don't qualify for travel or other incentives. Last year, even the top performers missed out because no matter what they did on the financial services side, they could not meet any of the P&C requirements. High prices and poor service killed it. And secondly, the lion's share of the commission goes to running the office. Office rent or mortgage, payroll, payroll taxes, advertising, marketing, utilities, etc. My experience is that I need 6.5% to 7% just to meet expenses. That leaves me about 3% to 3.5% on my best commission products--and I'm self employed so my 28% tax bracket, according to my accountant, is actually 55%. And when customers are PO'd about poor claim service, or an arbitrary underwriting decision, and leave, my paycheck shows a DEDUCTION. Nothing in Operations does that.

All that being said--I'm not at all confident that SF will keep agents around either. But I'm a little tired of hearing people with no clue what Agency does, talk about how useless they are. As for personnel costs, I believe agents now employ more people helping State Farm customers than State Farm itself does. Somebody still has to take care of the customers. If State Farm doesn't pay people to do it, agents have to.

agents are mostly absentee anyway. They play golf every day. most not very professional.

Half of the agents are over the age of 50. If you read the comments on this site, who is it that State Farm is targeting to get rid of? Those over the age of 50.

The transformation efforts are also an attempt to get rid of “dead weight”. When you have 19,000 agents and only 20% are pulling their weight while the other 80% drag the company down, what would you classify the vast majority of agents to as? Dead weight.

Don’t get me wrong, I personally don’t consider those over 50 to be dead weight so I’m not trying to lump those into one bucket. Not on the employee side anyway. Agents over 50 though? That’s another story.

In my experience the vast majority of the agents office staff were clueless as far as coverage, policies, claims procedures, explaining and giving the wrong information to the customers. As far as the agents themselves, nasty, rude, obnoxious, know-it-alls, who in most cases were clueless as well. The agents offices treated claims personnel like dirt as they (agents) thought they were the GODS of the company. Well Olympias is falling, and here come the agents falling as well down to earth. See how long you are all in business. Useless!

Agent trips, conventions, awards etc are all sales incentives. Car dealerships, medical device sales, printer sales, heavy duty earth moving equipment... literally every industry that has sales teams has incentives for those teams to sell. So if they deem a certain piece of operations work to be little/no value, it’s not necessarily bad business to be allocating those dollars instead to incentives because those are more likely to yield bottom line results. I know I sound like I’m being brutal but I think it’s pretty straight forward here.

Agents aren't going anywhere. We barely have an online presence now. They still sell our product.