Older adjusters (i have friends in both fire and auto) that are working their tails off just to stay above the claims coming in. They can't handle the volume and new folks are pretty worthless. Morale is low as they are tired of punching a clock and having their entire day timed, including potty breaks. Who wants to work under these conditions?
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Desk job? Is that all you can see in it? Just a hard chair to park your pants on from 9 to 5? Just a pile of papers to shuffle around and five sharp pencils and a scratchpad to make figures on? Maybe a little doodling on the side? Well that's not the way I look at it, Walter. To me, a claims man is a surgeon. That desk is an operating table and those pencils are scalpels and bone-chisels. And those papers are not just forms and statistics and claims for compensation. They're alive. They're packed with drama, with twisted hopes and crooked dreams. A claims man, Walter, is a doctor, bloodhound, cop, judge, jury and a father confessor all in one. And you want to tell me you're not interested. You don't want to work with your brains. All you want to do is work with your finger on the doorbell for a few bucks more a week. - Double Indemnity
This describes the total loss department with great accuracy.
The newer folks did not receive a fair amount of training in most places. They are given a script or word track and that is all they are told to do is go by that. That is not remarkable at all for the customer. A lot of these employees go to college, and are hired to come in and try to be a robot. If you go off of a word track, you cannot show any empathy or emotion to the customer. It is not fair to the new people to be treated this way and have to call a more experienced claim handler in another office to get help with how to handle a claim. TM's in some of these places do not know anymore than the employees that work for them. The turnover rate is so high the majority of employees leave before they get trained well enough to know what they are talking about to the customer. The customer needs to hear confidence, and emotion, and feeling in the voice of the claim handler. The select few customers that do not want to talk to the live person, want the service and if the service is not satisfactory and they have to call, they probably do not want to hear a word track. This is not remarkable to the customer or the employee.
My opinion: punching the clock, not that bad if you are on time anyway. The stress in claims city for most people I know, is you cannot leave early if you have an emergency without getting points, you cannot take a day off because there is no time available on the calendar for a whole year. You have to stalk the calendar to get a Tuesday or Wednesday off and those are few and far between. You are timed on everything. Claims is stressful enough without all of the other added stress. The flexibility is gone for anything that is unplanned. This system is mainly for the repeat offenders, however, it punishes everyone in some way. But yet they want remarkable service for the customer, but they do not give remarkable treatment for their employees and they don't think that won't carry over into the work product.
Original post entered by @HeavyChevy - I am just reposting - (Source: by Heavy Chevy | Post ID: @RzpvS9r-1ill )