Drinking from the New York Life Kool-Aid Part VIII

A Nightmare on the 10th Floor

“New York Life is the number one insurance company in the United States and according to Forbes Magazine, the most desirable Insurance Company in the World. With over 165 years of history, dating back to the Civil War, in which New York Life paid benefits to both sides, the company has showed strong financial stability. Events like the Civil War, War World I, The Great Depression, War World II, the Crash of 2008, none affected New York Life. New York life is the highest rated insurance company in the US, it’s a Fortune 100 company and… blah, blah, blah.”

That is part of the presentation I gave to prospects when I first met with them. And I was good at what I did while maintaining an extremely high closing percentage. During my run towards the end of 2014 I managed to turn in quite a few applications. And the following year, while I started to grow and become more experienced, the frequency of bringing in new business continued to increase. With new business came more and more paperwork, and with New York Life it was a lot. In Dallas they have this group of girls that would take care of processing the pages and pages and pages of documents you had to turn in for each case and client. They were located on the 10th floor turning to the left and down towards the end of the hallway… And this is where this horror story begins.

At first I would bring in all the paperwork required from the client, wait until all the mistakes showed up, go back to the client to correct such mistakes, bring the paperwork back, then wait for the long underwriting process to take place. It would take about six weeks for an answer, if I was lucky. Then I had to go back to the client, deliver the polices, get their signatures, bring back all that paperwork, wait for those mistakes to show up, go back to the client, correct whatever was wrong, come back to the office and pray that everything was OK.

As a rookie I made many mistakes with these polices. I learned from them quickly and was very careful to verify everything meticulously so to minimize having to go back to the clients again and again. But here is where New York Life’s system falls apart.

First, when it came to the application, we were not given adequate training; not only on how to fill it correctly, but on all the extra documentation we needed from the client especially if this client was an undocumented immigrant which composed more than half of my book of business. In training they forget to include the fact that the paperwork you had to turn it with one client did not apply to the undocumented ones. This meant me filling out all the wrong documents, turning them in, getting a phone call from the 10th floor days after I turned in the wrong documents, run after the client so to get the new signatures, turn in the right documents and hope there were no more mistakes.

In the beginning you are expected to make these mistakes. But as time went on I quickly learned how flawed the system really was. I don’t know whether it was the girls that were inept, bad management and supervision, New York Life’s overly complicated process or all of the above, which made things so hard for us agents to get a client approved within a reasonably time frame.

More than once I had the girls from the 10th floor call me asking for a document that I had already turned in that they somehow had lost. More than once after weeks of waiting for underwriting to make a decision, and only after I called asking for an update, did they notice that they misplaced the application and the underwriting process had not even started. More than once they left the applications lying somewhere waiting for an answer from me on a question they never asked. At one point I just considered that maybe I might have been the problem. But one day I caught an established agent yelling at them for over ten minutes letting them know how unacceptable their work was. Most of them were nice to me so I felt bad. Yet while speaking with other agents I heard horror stories similar to mine and established agents advised me to be on top of them because of the many mistakes they made.

The underwriting process was not better. Normally it was slow but if any health issues came up, you had to go back to the client with ten more questions that were not in the original application. And those questions triggered more questions which triggered more questions to the point that I had clients ask me to stop the process and then went and purchased their insurance from another company. And for those who did wait to see the process through, it was at best a three month wait if they were approved. I had clients go through a six month waiting period just to be declined by New York Life. And two clients of mine had to wait an entire YEAR before they got an answer from underwriting. Basically they made you as an agent jump through hoops and waste your time and at the end get nothing from it.

Then you got the process in itself. First you have to meet with the client and convince them to purchase something from you. Then came the hour long filling of the application. Then we had to order the lab tests and schedule the nurse visit to the client’s home. Then we had to schedule the phone interview that took at least half an hour and that’s if the client was willing to do so. I had sales fall apart because the client didn’t pick up the phone to complete the interview. Then came the delivery of the policy. We had to deliver the policy, get more signatures from the client, turn in all these documents and also hope no mistakes were made. Running after busy clients to get the entire process completed was very exhausting for us as agents and even more for the clients.

Now let us add to this that if we had taken a deposit with the application, which we tried to do so that the client would be temporarily covered during the underwriting process, a number of issues also came up. Some clients would automatically be bank drafted the next month while some other clients weren’t and we had no idea when was which. If the client wanted to change the draft date they could not do it just because we took money with the application. For these clients we had to wait for the 90 days temporary coverage to lapse so to be able to change the draft date. Not one person was able to explain to me why this was the way it was. Clients were being drafted when told they were not going to be, some weren’t drafted when they were told to expect the bank draft, and yet others were double drafted creating bank overdrafts left and right. Sometimes the Dallas office accepted responsibility and paid back the clients their overdraft fees and sometimes they did not. You have no idea the headaches I had to go through because of this fiasco. One agent lost her job because a client was so pissed-off with a double draft that he canceled his policy triggering a $3,000 charge back that the agent never recovered from.

So here we are trying to make some money and stop this working for free nonsense and the process in itself, plus the inept staff, is designed to make whatever of a life you had left completely miserable. With an average of a three month waiting period for clients to be approved, if they were ever approved, I had many clients get tired of waiting who either changed their minds or just did not trust in New York Life’s credibility at that point. Either way, I lost sales because of this.

Had I’ve been making any money at all, I would have had the energy to put up with this. But New York Life seems to have no faith in their agents, products, training or system so to pay a base salary to those who are the heart and soul of their company. I recall one agent coming up to me saying: “New York Life says that they spend $250,000 in training per agent. That’s a complete bull s**t! We have to pay for everything here. Internet that we don’t use, a phone that we don’t use, each photocopy that we make… throw us a bone!” And he was right. Not only did we not get a base pay but we were charged for everything but the air we breathed. Even though I knew he was right, I convinced myself to not pay attention to his words and continue pushing forward. Yet as hard as I tried to stay positive I could not avoid feeling demoralized. Then something happened…

All of the sudden an announcement was made. New York Life signed a contract with AARP which opened a huge opportunity for agents all over the country. The first agents who were able to fulfill a certain criteria before a set dateline would enter the New York Life’s AARP program. These agents would receive free hot leads composed of AARP members that were interested in more information about Long Term Care. This meant a huge opportunity for me! Getting free leads of people that are already interested could boost my sales immensely. So I jumped on this opportunity and began the race for this prize.

But I immediately encountered problems. First, I noticed that all established agents were not interested at all on working this program. That was a huge red flag for me. Second, starting with Michael Scovel, the managing partners showed little to no enthusiasm towards the AARP program which worried me immensely. I asked around and no one seemed to even want to try to pursue this opportunity. Established agents did not even sell Long Term Care Policies because, according to them, those policies did not count towards their retirement. Even Mr. Dean Panjwani recommended me to concentrate my efforts on other activities and forget about AARP. In fact, EVERYONE except the trainers and our Long Term Care Consultant looked at this AARP thing as a total waste of time. Besides all this negative vibe towards AARP I made the decision to go after this program using the many suggestions, strategies and encouragement given to us by New York Life’s Long Term Care Consultant. I fed on her enthusiasm and continued to concentrate on the end game and not on how hard my journey had been up to this point. Besides, I had learned that Long Term Care applications where handled in New York which meant I did not have to deal with the issues on the 10th floor. Little did I know that the devil I knew in Dallas would actually be better than the one I would later have to deal with in New York. But I'll talk about that soon.

In the meantime I had to think about digging myself out of the $10,000 hole I was at the moment buried in. So I kept doing the activities, tried different strategies, and little by little I continued working off that $10,000 debt. Our bank account was completely drained and I was wondering how my fellow agents, who were struggling as bad as me, were able to manage. It was during this period in time that I found out that most agents secretly had a second job. And they had to keep that a secret because if New York Life found out that you were even shining shoes at a corner, you’d be immediately terminated. So, not only did New York Life keep you captive from selling to other insurance companies (which was understandable) but you couldn’t work at anything else AT ALL. Still having faith in the Blue Kool-Aid, my wife took on a second job cleaning offices at night and I gave her a hand. But our enthusiasm kept fading away. I was about to make the decision to quit when I woke up one day to find an $800 deposit on my bank account from New York Life. After six months without a paycheck, I finally had gotten myself out of the red. So now with renewed energy and enthusiasm I concentrated my efforts on fulfilling the requirements needed to get in the AARP program. However the road in the pursuit of success was going to get rougher as time went by.

NEXT ON ‘Drinking from the New York Life Kool-Aid’...

Social Media Class, the race to The Summit and the Dallas General Office Exodus.