I wish my job was something to be proud of
Posting here to vent about my job.
I want to preface this post with a disclaimer; I do not completely hate my job, as I need it to pay bills and actually survive, and try my best to put my best foot forward each day and do what I can to help people with the tools I am given. I also want to mention that although I have my misgivings about the gig and try my best to not take it personal, I am grateful that I have the opportunity to put money on the table and keep my cat and myself fed from a job that I can do from home.
Each and every day, I handle phone calls from people who are disgruntled about the scam of big insurance companies. Being a customer facing grunt, who’s main goal is to ensure my manager meets her bonus quota and ensure the CEO gets to go on his monthly yacht trip, I feel enraged for the policyholders who consistently call in to complain about the grift that is supplemental insurance.
I am sure this has helped many people, and kudos to anyone who has ever successfully filed a claim with insurance and actually received a payout for an injury or illness they have had. But the amount of people who don’t even know they have insurance and pay for it number by the millions, and on top of that, 9/10 calls are people calling because their claim has requested additional information that they have trouble obtaining or literally cannot get from the medical providers.
The people who handle said claims all reside safely in India, far away from the lives they ruin on a daily basis. (Nothing against Indian people, it is just very clear that we have outsourced this department for cheap labor, and it shows.) This same team is also responsible for not handling calls, but organizing who takes what calls on a daily basis on the backend, so if you are fast at taking calls, they will throw you calls on purpose for being efficient, and if you take too long with calls, you’ll get called out for a high call time. They also love to throw you calls when they know you are about to clock out, resulting in overtime you have to take, because you would get in trouble for ending a call with a policyholder just because you need to go.
The common people I interact with on a daily basis call for assistance in understanding the 58 pages that are given to them by sleazy insurance agents who never bother to explain the benefits, (which are more often than not really shitty benefits) just to make a sale and move on with their lives; knowingly trapping new policyholders into paying for this insurance despite the benefits being of minimal to no use to them upon diagnosis of something serious.
Every day, I deal with people who are sick, taking care of someone who is sick, hospitalized, terminally ill, etc. and the disappointment these people feel in a system they once had faith in is consistently disheartening. Just today, I had to inform someone who was terminally ill about her claim taking long to process. I am expected to say things like this to people with a happy disposition despite the news being potentially devastating to the caller. It is an extremely difficult balance to follow and easily leads to burn out and an extremely high turnover rate within the company. They love to frame the training process as the job being friendly, but they downplay the types and volume of calls you will be getting to an extremely degree. Calls are mostly frustrated people who need money and think you are the one stopping them from getting it.
It is designed this way so that the claims department can hide in the shadows and not have to face the people whose lives they are ruining.
Seeing how this company has millions of policyholders across the country, they are way too big of a conglomerate to ever be taken down by the little guy. I find it completely unjust and unfair that most insurance companies work like this, and there is nothing anybody can do to take down giant corporations like this. From the bottom of my heart, I wish we could all band together and boycott companies like this, companies like Meta, X, Tesla, etc and really show them that they are nothing without us. It is unfortunate that the common person is too enthralled and busy doom scrolling that they fail to see they continue to feed these monsters with data and information they can use against us.
I hope anybody reading this understands that there is at least one person on the phones trying every day to assist the best I can and tell people exactly what they need to do to get their claims approved when the company I work for does everything in it’s power to make it impossible for them to do so.
I wish I could leave this job, and do something more fulfilling, more informative, and helpful to people, but I don’t have any savings to look for a new job, and this job is so demanding of my attention and energy that I find it difficult to look for anything remote that I can do successfully. I am 32, and I never went to college, unfortunately.
If you read this far, thanks for doing so, and I appreciate any discourse or conversation on your thoughts regarding this subject. Even if you disagree with me, I will be happy to understand your points of view, so I can also make better decisions for myself as well. I know I may have rambled a little, but what are your experiences and thoughts when it comes to conglomerate companies like this? Does anyone think this bubble will eventually burst? What resources do you think I can use to find something more fulfilling?
TLDR; insurance companies are assholes, and I wish I didn’t need this job or could find something more fulfilling than being a call grunt.