Dehumanizing Experience
Pros
Decent pay; excellent benefits, paid training
Cons
Liberty Mutual is extremely number-driven to the point that it is dehumanizing, to both the employee and the customer. For example, everyone on my team was told that they should avoid going to the bathroom between breaks, told we should "train our bladders," because it counted against our metrics. Our metrics determine our bonuses, raises, advancement, opportunities for shift bidding and more. One of my fellow co-workers wet herself trying to wait for break, but got stuck on a phone call. We were also told at point that we were abusing our .59 second grace period and had cost the company thousands of dollars in doing so. So they began reprimanding us for using any of the grace period alotted for break or lunch. In other words, they normally wouldn't count you late or issue a point if you were within the .59 seconds. But we began receiving warnings if we did. In addition, the Liberty Mutual creed emphasizes that we always do what is right for the customer. Yet it counts against our metrics if we have to call back to a customer. Meaning, we are penalized for call-outs. Instead, LM directs us to send call-outs to a follow-up team. Which means you no longer handle that particular issue. There are times I called the customer back to take care of an issue and found them very appreciative. I feel this builds better relations and trust than passing the buck to someone who did not even talk to the customer. There's a bit of an emotional attachment and responsibility that develops when you connect with a customer, calm them and offer to resolve any issue they have with their policy or bill. Passing that on to someone else means you don't really know if it was resolved or resolved properly. Liberty Mutual has centralized their customer service to call centers. This means that the field agents no longer have customer service reps in their offices across the country. Working in a call center means that you rarely talk to the same customer twice. So you never build relationships. Many customers do not appreciate this change as they prefer dealing with people they have relationships with and trust. Sometimes days would go by without the opportunity to talk to co-workers because of back-to-back calls. Once in a great while I would have a break or lunch period that lined up with one of them, but not often. Asking for time off does not involved talking to a human. You put your request in via the computer and hope to get it off. Sometimes you ask for a day off and never hear back. If you are an introvert who can handle sitting all day and staring at a computer screen, this is the job for you. You can talk to customers all day on the phone that you will never meet or build a relationship with. You have very little time to talk to co-workers. You rarely leave your desk. LM is extremely micro-managed. They know every email you send out, every site you look at, have the capability to listen in on phone calls or view your screen at any time. I felt the environment was far more restrictive and evasive than it needed to be. Perhaps in the scheme of things, their techniques do manage to bring in more money to the company. But it loses the personal touch completely. The company is void of compassion.
