Connecting clients with the proper health plan to help improve their quality of life is easy. Assurance and its policies, procedures, management and sales software make it difficult. Below are just a few of the bullet points I can note that prospective employees should know:
You can’t get incoming calls from existing clients. They are put into an automated menu which allows them to inadvertently get transferred to another agent who can then take your sale.
Clients on the national Do Not Call Registry won’t be able to be reached by you even if you have an ongoing relationship with them and permission to call. If you miss a call from them, you can’t call them back. If they are unhappy with the plan you wrote them you can’t help, they get upset and file a grievance thinking you sold them a bag of goods when you could have handled the situation and maintained that relationship. And you don’t have a personal voicemail with a greeting, so they don’t know if they even dialed the correct number in the first place. This also greatly effects your referral business and your ability to connect with people requesting you as their agent.
There is no HR person to contact or phone number if you need help. You must rely on email communications, and it can take a week or more before you hear from anyone.
The lack of reporting and tracking of your sales and commissions makes it virtually impossible for you to know if you are getting paid correctly, what your retention % is or what your commissions will be. They do not provide you with a commission statement before your check is deposited. Most months I witnessed many of my coworkers get paid incorrectly. Most were underpaid but some were even paid extra by mistake which was then taken back from their next check and the error wasn’t even communicated to them. I witnessed many good agents leave the company as a result. I’ve seen numerous others take a leave of absence because of work stress. Employees want to know what they can expect in their paycheck so they can live their lives accordingly.
The sales software has so many glitches that in one case we had 5 software updates in one day following a system upgrade. Sales agents are expected to maintain 6.5 hours of call time per day but in many cases you can’t achieve this because your system is down and you are constantly working with IT. The most dangerous aspect to sales agents regarding the Sales platform is that it quotes inaccurate information. The software states certain doctors are covered by a plan when they are not, not covered by a plan when they actually are, misquotes copays for doctors, medications, etc, and is not always accurate in detailing the additional benefits. This a major problem that can lead to founded client allegations and the loss of your carrier appointments. So as a result you can't rely on the information that Assurance provides you. You need redundancies such as downloading the 200 plus page Evidence of Coverage document for each and every plan you discuss with the client and cross reference that with the information shown on the sales platform. It takes a lot of extra time and creates a larger margin for error, confusion for some agents, and longer client calls which reduce your ability to hit certain commission goals.
Because they overload frontline sales managers with a huge amount of weekly procedures, compliance checks, call monitoring, near daily meetings, payroll responsibilities and large team numbers of subordinates I found that many new employees failed that could have been successful. Although the managers want to help and truly care they just don’t have the time to spread out to those in need of help or that have questions. So we rely on each other and our coworkers. However, this so rampant that it takes us all off the phones to help one another. And that in turn has its own ripple effect. During the busy season we have to focus on our own sales and put our Microsoft Teams account on Do Not Disturb hence ignoring our coworkers needs to meet our own goals. It’s very unfortunate.
I am in the process of beginning my job search but for anyone hearing all the great things about this company from recruiters be careful. Just because they are owned by a prestigious company such as Prudential Financial it doesn’t mean they have their act together. And recently, Prudential has been coming down on Assurance as a result. The leads and marketing are great but what good is that if you putting your license on the line by working here and the systems in place make it difficult for you to do your job? I started here with many goals as did most of us but I’ve seen such a high turnover only a small handful of the coworkers I started with are still here. The industry turnover is high but here it is much higher. If I wasn’t loyal to my Sales Manager I would have left sooner.
