Pros
- If you get the right manager, the job can be quite fulfilling and you have a great sense of accomplishment. Those managers are few and far between. - As a newbie to insurance generally, it taught me a lot of basics about car insurance in the UK, a lot of which is transferable to Canadian markets. - It can definitely be used to hone your personal relations skills
Cons
Some of the management got promoted way too young or way too early in their career: others have been denied management roles for "using it as a way to get off the phones" when a lot of managers openly admit that it's why they applied for senior and management roles to begin with. Other superiors are non-stop micro-managers. There have been times where people have been threatened to go to review and lose their job for not using the customer's first name when speaking with them. Others have been told they're being "too negative" for mentioning the soda machine was out of Diet Pepsi because they "now went on to ruin somebody else's lunch break". Petty stuff that has no impact on the business in any way, shape or form but they turn it into big issues. There are way too many targets to meet that rely on random chance. Customer price is dependent on how willing the underwriting team are willing to insure the customer. If we're not competitive, or we don't secure the sale, our cancellation rate or call-to-transaction rate go up. If a customer says no to adding extra cars or homes to the policy, you're expected to push and probe into why and essentially force a price down their throat in the hopes that they'll change their mind. If they still deny the quote, managers will ask "why didn't you ask them about other family members". I don't know about you, but I'm not going to pay for my brother's car insurance. Pitching ancillaries is along the same lines; customer straight up didn't want the product? "Oh it must be because you didn't use their first name". If a customer straight up says "no" to multi-cover options, the literal feedback you'll get from all managers is "they'll say no because they don't understand" and literally want us to view customers as if they're stupid. Another rubric is "3+ Risks" - entirely reliant on how many vehicles or properties the policy holder owns or are willing to insure with us, which is again not something we can control. TLDR; Unfair stat thresholds which come from luck of the draw. In renewals, your stats and incentive come from whether or not a customer is willing to renew a policy, often hundreds of pounds higher than another company. Often in the Renewals department, you spend the first few minutes of your call trying to calm down customers who insult you or the company due to their high renewal price. Often the company doesn't give the best price out to the customer first, which makes them play a game of cat-and-mouse/ There's a line in the sand that needs to be drawn, and when it comes to customer interactions the sales are pushier than they need to be. When it comes to employees, Admiral will always take the side of management. Keeping this in mind, there's obvious favouritism; I once saw a group of people wanting to be seniors go through the training program together. One person literally left for the entire time the training course was going on, and still got promoted to management while the person who actually buckled down and did the work got rejected. Others expressed that they were looking to leave the company, and then within a month or two they suddenly became full managers or positions magically opened up for them. I saw a hard-worker of three years get declined a senior role in favor of somebody who was still on probation and only worked for the company for three months at the time. Other jobs are literally created specifically for one person to apply, but they open the position up to the entire floor as a facade so it looks more above-board when it comes to the recruiting process. One manager got fired for sleeping with his employee, whereas another manager got offered a transfer to the other department, when the outcome should be the same universally. Despite all the negotiations we deal with when it comes to customers, there still isn't enough pay. When it comes to complaints, agents are the first to handle it. Negotiations? Agents. We often annoy customers even more by having to put them on hold to do price matches that we should be able to handle ourselves; and we have to do this through Teams group chats, where half the time managers don't even respond to the request and leave it to another manager. Often I've been left to do managers' jobs for them including doing call listenings and helping other agents with improving their call quality, just to get told that "all I do is press buttons all day and don't deserve a better wage". Thanks, Admiral, for making me do the job your higher-ups refuse to do and then make me feel worse because of it! Compliance is always breathing down your neck to the point where if you miss one word in a script and it doesn't change the meaning of your words, they'll still find a way to screw you out of hard-earned incentive pay. Some managers won't even fight on your behalf to overturn the decision, whereas others do. There's no universal standard managers follow; what some managers condone, others don't, and you'll often find yourself walking on eggshells around them. TL;DR The office is very unprofessional and likes to preach perfect standards of conduct, but at the end of the day, they can't seem to uphold their own values of performance and instead would rather threaten review and termination over small, inconsequential things that make zero impact on job performance, or offer favouritism to the disciplinary and promotion process. No matter how well you do at the job, they're always going to find a way to make you feel like you've failed at something that you have zero control over. You'll never feel like you're compensated enough for your time there. You'll be pushed into rapport-building which opens you up to more red calls, and it's impossible to live up to every single standard they have - yet they expect you to. Would you like a job where your performance and bonuses depend how willing your superiors are to insure the customer? Would you like a job where every single word you say is monitored to the point where you can get fired for not referring to your caller by their name when it's completely unnecessary? Would you like a job where you make all the money for the company on their behalf, just to have them look for ways to take it away from you? then step right up, this job is for you!
