Pros
Excellent pay and excellent benefits
Cons
Extreme Stress. I started in 1995 and planned to retire from State Farm in 2028. I left after 22 years as a Claim Rep due to a series of bad upper management decisions in my last 2-3 years (2014-2017). Many people left, including many with 20+ years' experience. We took early retirement. The company priority shifted from unmatched quality customer service and claims processing to quantity, quantity, quantity. We were micromanaged by great managers caught in the middle, and we had every single action we took recorded by computers and phones routed through computers. Claim handling became a crazy call center environment. Daily team meetings were held so management could show everyone how poorly we were doing with all kinds of numbers in red, yellow, and green on huge dry-erase boards for everyone to see like group-shaming 3-year-olds. The youngest recruits were leaving in droves along with those of us who had the most experience. Others are stuck in their jobs until they can take early retirement at 55 because the pay and benefits are great, but not worth it now. Half of the auto claims employees in the Austin, TX Operation Center were under a Doctor's care and taking some kind of prescription drugs for the stress - I was on Prozac and Buspar at the same time. I had to get out before it killed me. I was a complex auto claim rep at the end, meaning I was trusted to do the hardest job in auto claims. I handled lawsuits, death claims, serious injuries, multi-car collisions, disputed liability, and coverage questions. I never had a poor performance review, and I was making $80K plus unlimited overtime that was becoming mandatory when I left. Who has heard of non-management employees refusing to make $50 an hour OT because we couldn't handle the stress? I loved the company, my managers, the agents, the policyholders, and my co-workers. We built the best claim operation in the nation and we were truly a family until the home office in Bloomington decided to implement a series of bad decisions billed as "improvements" starting with the claims processing computer software that was the heart of the operation after we went nearly paperless. It was a nightmare. It cost the company so much to implement that I am sure it is still in use. When I left, we were required to leave headsets on all day so we could hear little beeps that told us we were suddenly connected to a call coming in on someone else's claim. When that call ended, we were supposed to quickly enter comments into the computer and go back into ready mode only to receive another call immediately. We lost control of our inventories because we didn't have time to work our own claims. My claim load went from 60-70 to 315! We were unable to get vacation time approved because there weren't enough people for required "coverage" that went from 8-5 Mon-Fri to 6-8 weekdays and added hours on weekends. Many who asked for a week off got 3-4 days if they were lucky. Assigned preferred shifts were given to those with seniority leaving others to work terrible hours. Senior employees volunteered to change shifts monthly so others could work normal hours at least sometimes, but our requests were denied.I discovered that Sundays were terrible for others, also, because we got sick of the thought of having to go back to work the next day. Nightmares became common because we would think of things we missed or deadlines coming up. My experience gave me PTSD that I will have to deal with the rest of my life.