They say you are an hourly employee but you will be paid 7.75 hours a day even if you work 12 hours. Your dollars per hour erodes very quickly with that approach. And you will be required to do far more than anyone can get done in 7.75 hours a day, trust me! Every aspect of your job is measured and graded. Flawed customer surveys where even an 8 out of a best score of 10 is failing are a big thorn in a lot of adjusters' sides. A customer can screw you for missing a phone phone call, no joke! You will be over worked. What you are expected to do is not practical. No other company that I know of requires a single person to run so many aspects of the claims process as this one does. You must make a minimum of 3 calls throughout a claim to every customer you get. Take care of their rental, their payments to the shops, supplements, the entire total loss from evaluation to collecting the title- when that is the case, and answer the phone every time it rings. Now 3 calls per customer may not seem like a lot, but you will have between 8 and 10 customers a day. Do the math and that is 24 to 30 outgoing calls a day in addition to getting your work done. An average call is 3 minutes. When you're writing the estimates, you will be required to find the best price for parts available. That means making several calls to suppliers while standing at the vehicle. No big deal, right? Do that in the rain, the snow, when it is polar vortexing, or in the dog days of summer and you will grow tired of it. You are required to document everything as well. Just about every contact with the customer has to be described on the computer. Talk for 3 minutes, then go online to the Geico website, wait for the claim to load, and type in what you talked about. That alone can take up a day. And the rental companies are constantly calling for rental extensions! But-Before extending a customer's rental, you must find out why their car is not done in the "reasonable time" you are required to set by Geico. Nothing you do will be quick and easy. And it builds up any builds up and builds up until you consider taking vacation days just to get caught up. Another measurement is productivity. You could literally spend 8 hours with customers settling total losses on an unpaid Saturday because doing it during the week would cut into the time you have to write the total loss estimates . And if you don't write 4 or 5 total loss a day while doing your total loss rotation, you are simply unproductive according to the measurement formulas Geico uses. That doesn't seem too much to ask though? Well it is because you need to arrange towing, get cars out of impound, and call internal investigators when claims appear fishy all while keeping your customers informed. You have to set the last day for customer's rentals, take care of salvage, and refer customers to a car buying service. And make no mistake, customers are rarely happy with the value of their cars so when you call them with the news, you are in for a long conversation that is not going to go smoothly! So now to overtime. Being paid time and a half sounds great! It is around $33 per hour. But the time and a half hours are weighed as time and a half in your productivity score so you will be "encouraged" to work 8 hours of overtime but put in for only 5 or 6. And people do it because the only way to get raises is by having a high enough score on all the things you're graded on. Lastly, realize that at least half of your customers will be angry or mistrusting. They say things like "Your customer hit me! Why should I have to be forced to allow a used part on my car?" You are the enemy and they believe you are trying to screw them over some how. It is a constant battle to be pleasant to them as they argue with you over after market parts or why your estimate is far lower than the shop's. So you will have to defend your estimate and try to win them over. It is exhausting! Then the shops the customers go to do the same on a supplement. Your supervisor will pick apart your estimates and ding you for the numbers of hours you put for repairs or any mistake they feel you may have made. That is called a reinspection. They have to do those because that is something they get measured on. So on one reinspection, your supervision may put excessive refinish time because you wrote to blend an adjacent panel that in his/her opinion did not need it. Then a week later, they write that you should have blended. You will write to replace a door, they will say it could have been repaired. But you know the shop the customer is going to would never agree to a repair so to avoid a supplement, you wrote replace. By the way, number of supplements are also a measurable metric. Oh for the love of all that is sacred, pass on this job!
