American Fidelity Assurance Company reviews

The company tries very hard to provide for the field staff, however; it's an ongoing challenge to overcome the essential challenges the position presents. If you have even basic sales skills you will exceed your annual goals no problem. It then comes down to who your manager is and what accounts you are assigned to. If you have an incompetent manager it will be nearly impossible to succeed in this position ONLY due to your account assignments. You are constantly reminded about the importance of the "employer relationship" yet you are compensated only on your production. How does that incentivize anyone to provide any type of "service" to the account when you are already working into evening hours just to catch up on email. And then there is the travel. You WILL travel. Now I knew this going in, but it is still the worst feeling in the world when you are assigned to an account a time zone away in a crummy account where you see three people per day. For me it came down to to what mattered most to me in my life....and that was enjoying my life and family more than I had been. What I miss most is my colleagues that are still with the company. There really is a connection with those who sit in the same staff room, kindergarten chairs, or conference rooms, as you do day after day.

Confusing/misleading/often changing compensation plan-4 changes to the compensation document in less than three years. Local management doesn't even understand most recent changes. Extremely unbalanced workload- 60%+ of accounts need serviced in the 4th quarter. Management's solution, start your 4th quarter groups in September. Very unprofessional, and not in keeping with AFA's mantra of being an extension of a company's HR department. Blatant favoritism-Worst company I've ever worked for in this regard. If you are 100% of quota, but not buddies with the district manager, you will not work in the new (and therefore financially lucrative) groups. Quite the contrary in that account managers with abysmal production (but personal pals with the DM) will be put in the position to enroll these new groups. Coached to tell customers one thing while actually doing otherwise-We are told to tell everyone we meet that we are salaried account managers, but don't be fooled...this company is commission driven! Even with the lopsided workload you will be expected to be selling 4 out of 5 days a week. Again this is completely unrealistic. Additionally we are coached to tell everyone we are needs based salespeople. We tell people we are NOT policy pushers, but again once our core benefits (disability and life insurance) are saturated in a group we are expected to come up with an angle to sell our tertiary products like accident, cancer, critical illness, or my favorite riders on existing policies. In this same vein we are coached to present EVERY employee we meet with with a life insurance quote, no financial needs analysis completed (I really don't think most of the employees or especially management would even know what a needs analysis would look like). This is the very definition under insurance ethics of "pushing policies"! Unbelievable turnover- One reason I took this job was because of what was described as extremely low turnover. It was described as less than 5% turnover annually. Anyone familiar with the insurance industry will recognize this as an extremely low turnover rate. The reality is that in the last several years I have seen closer to 60-70% turnover both locally as well as nationally.