This platform is atrocious. It simply does not work for what we do here at State Farm. How many millions of dollars did we spend on this garbage? I’m in agency and it is obvious this ECRM debacle was not tested for what we do in the agents office. Anyone else out there can comment on this? Vision going forward? Problems that cannot be solved? Endless outages?
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Yes. I am in Agents Office in Bismarck and I am frustrated that ABS is gone and we have to use ECRM. It is stupid and does not work good.
I have had problems even logging into ECRM sometimes too.
I started in insurance in 1993 with paper apps. At Farmers we were using the IBM green screens, in 2002 we dumped those and went web based. I bought my own CRM Agency Business Systems from Oregon and grew from nothing to right at $3 Million in premium in 13 years. After being retired for a while I decided to work again and go hooked up with a State Farm agent. ABS was great, worked fine, then they brought in ECRM. After 6 months of that I quit and took over an agency of Nationwide.
No more headaches, good rates, and we are independent so I can do the price if that is what they want or give them the best coverage plan with Nationwide. ECRM forced me to leave State Farm. Agent and staff were great but ECRM s—ed.
As a prospective SF employee (service), I was a bit intimidated by the numerous, seemingly overly-complex screens on the ECRM. The lack of any user documentation, however, was terrifying. When I asked, I was told that it would be OK for me to take screen grabs of the various screens so that I could write myself a tutorial. Really? Hundreds of millions of dollars spent on this product and no user documentation with which to train new employees? The number of work hours that will be wasted on having other employees leave their desks to explain how to use features—especially if it’s in the middle of a service call—is staggering. I’m not sure where the buck stops on this one, but the first rule of customer service is: Give new service personnel the resources that they need to get up to speed. Ideally, those resources include documentation that new employees can reference, so as not to flounder (and thus provide poor service) or constantly bug the heck out of other staff who need to be able to do their own jobs. Where’s the manual? The online documentation of ongoing changes? Any (polite) input would be appreciated.
This isn’t the same company anymore. Tipsord has attacked agency force by deeming anything he doesn’t like as “non compliant” and bringing up the “trust relationship with State Farm” whenever anyone has a differing opinion of him or his
Minions. I can’t imagine how bad it must be for corporate employees who aren’t independent contractors like agents. Although State Farm still treats agents like employees and whenever they bring up the fact that we’re independent contractors they tell us that we’re “employed at will” so they could fire us for anything.
They’ve gotten out of control and someone needs to put them in check.
Great company, employees and agency force being dismantled piece by piece. All time low morale both inside and outside. Impossible to get promoted to field claims from inside claims unless you happen to live in the zip code where the claims are.
Losing policies like no other time in history due to service declines. JD Powers studies prove point that service has declined to all time low point.
We now use newest employees in ILR to decide if file should be earmarked for subrogation ? These folks don’t understand liability or coverages so how much are we missing in subrogation collections?
ECRM is a joke and much more involved than typical SF agents office needs. Easiest thing an agents office should be able to do is a basic quote for car or home. Now it’s a nightmare. Adding a car to mutual policyholder can now come back as Fire and Casualty. End result is we lose the household.
Where are we going here? Reminds me of children’s book The Emperor Has No Clothes. Is the Board of Directors asleep at the wheel?
Out agents are the envy of the industry, and are outshine only by the senior executives ability to flawlessly make perfect strategic decisions that are outshined only by their awesome good looks. Now where is my raise.
Other companies use Salesforce, we should be able to. We do have the best agency force.
@Ytw8JTc-2jck All that needs to happen is him not to be reelected to chairman of the board next year and they could easily oust him.
The "sour grapes and sore losers" guy has no vested interest in this conversation other than to generate clicks and page views. Do not respond to him.
2aek- if I were in the cube next to you I would reach over and back hand you so hard they would hear it down the hall.
Who is going to force Tipsord out? He has complete authority over the company. The Board he chairs is a reliable rubber stamp for whatever he wants. As long as the Board gets paid they will accept whatever he tells them and ask no tough questions.
@Ytw8JTc-2aek You would be wise not to drink the kool aid State Farm is selling rn. I have a strong feeling Tipsord and his Indian minion advisors are on the way out. If there's one thing I know about State Farm it's that they won't put up with declining sales for long. Tipass is running out of people to blame and the walls are closing in on him. Maybe you too?
still the site for sour grapes and sore losers
Forget ECRM or anything else. Those bozos can’t even keep Email working for us to sell.
I don't know when Tipsy will get booted. All I know is that they had better delete all the executives who got us into this mess at the same time.
How long do you guys think until Tipsord is booted out due to our declining market share in auto and year over year worse auto production results?
I really hate him and everything that id--t stands for so I hope he gets the boot soon. I'll have a party for sure when he does.
To add to the last post, it's also fair to point out that Systems has been going through the same pain that most other departments have been going through for the last year. I'm honestly surprised anything gets done. Which in hindsight, would perhaps have been better.
To the previous poster: please don't blame the developers. The developers had zero choice in the matter. The marching orders on this thing came down from WAY UP the food chain.
I worked on one of the architecture teams and I personally watched people get shipped off to different departments if they dared to question the direction.
Several of us tried to warn leadership. They did not listen.
Long time agent here, it’s hard not to get the feeling they rolled out this POS with the intent of frustrating the tenured agents to the point the simply retire, god knows I Am tempted. When all we really required was a simple platform we got this. All 19000 agents should be able to line up and kick the developers in the nuts as hard as we can so they can feel our pain. What a bunch of out of touch dumb MFrs.
What's more worrying than salesforce is this Policy Center c-ap. I'm in Agency and I don't think they realize how awful that system really is. Not to mention none of the other big competitors use it and it's not even owned by State Farm it's owned by Guidewire. It takes away any control from the agent and automates everything which strips us of any flexibility when writing policies. That could be the end of us as #1
The system is great for sales activity. But it’s clumsy and cumbersome for service. Somewhere in convincing themselves that we’re a sales organization, management must have forgotten that service is a far bigger portion of eveyone’s day, including agents.
It was $140,000,000 to Salesforce. It in the public domain. Whats notnis how much they spent in manhours etc, on 1.0 and 2.0
You mean Salesforce? I was in Marketing when this debacle was being forced through. I can tell you that the architect in charge of that debacle (if you can call him that) had zero clue what he was doing, although I'm sure he'd be happy to tell you about his experience with message queues. Everyone saw this c-ap coming a mile away except for the happy fool in charge. He was too busy roaming around the office playing Pokemon Go.