Wisconsin’s Sentry Insurance Cuts Office Jobs, Home-Based Agents

September 9, 2012

  • September 10, 2012 at 4:52 pm
    Tony Pirozzoli says:
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    The real news is the fact that they will sell off the thousands of policies in Southeast Wisconsin, they will only service a small number of clients within driving distance of their home office. They will not continue selling Home-Auto-umbrella coverage. They plan to sell off those clients and policies over the next 6-8 months to other insurance companies. They have not given you the whole story. They sell high risk auto and motorcyle coverage through Dairyland Insurance.

  • September 12, 2012 at 4:11 pm
    Jennifer Yannayon says:
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    I had to call the main office to have a simple question answered because I was unable to reach my agent, only to be told that he no longer works there because they laid him off for good. I hope for your sake that this isn’t going to come back and bite you in the butt where your customers are concerned in doing this. You were considered number “ONE” in the insurance realm the way you provided for your customers. This really upsets me to think that you would do this to your good customers who have been with you a long time.

  • September 17, 2012 at 9:42 am
    Tony Baloney says:
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    They employ 4300 workers and they need to lay off 27 home office workers? That is a small percent of their workforce, so it makes you wonder why they would do that rather than let retirements and attrition lower their staff level. If they have redundancies, retraining those workers to do jobs that are open makes more sense. I can understand agent layoffs, because some may not be in areas they care to service, or may not produce enough to be economical.

  • September 17, 2012 at 4:26 pm
    Matthew says:
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    Most of their agents had their business handed to them by the company when they were hired on and didn’t work to grow. This was an unprofitable venture for Sentry. Dairyland makes them money via independent agents. The captive/employee agents were in La La land. Some were making 200k doing almost nothing with benefits and pension to boot.

  • September 17, 2012 at 11:03 pm
    Stephen J Stasiak says:
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    You can bet your _ _ _ I’m taking my business somewhere else!

  • September 18, 2012 at 4:08 pm
    unknown says:
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    I worked there as an agent and WAS NOT handed any book. The older agents were from years ago, true. As a agent there, I didn’t make any kind of money. I saw the things Sentry was doing that was making my job harder to do (sign new customers) and I even told a friend I don’t know how they expect to continue on this path and make P&C work. So I went elsewhere. This is not profitable for them and apparently, they are not planning on making P&C work.

  • September 24, 2012 at 5:53 pm
    VA insurance guy says:
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    I worked for Sentry for two years in their commercial insurance line. They had/have a great product, but boy was it hard to work for them. The favored tactic of management was to threaten your job if sales didn’t meet expectations. Sorry to hear about folks losing their positions with the company, but perhaps it will lead to new thinking within a good old insurance company that could use some new approaches.

  • September 25, 2012 at 9:03 pm
    tagteam says:
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    Give Pete some time, he’ll get this fixed. He should buy an Independend Insurance carrier soon, and set the same course as QBE and Liberty Mutual. Sentry has the cash, and the smarts.

  • October 15, 2013 at 4:34 pm
    Robert says:
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    Okay. I spent many years in the P/C business, but not in sales. As a member of senior staff (not management), I believe I smell a huge rat in this scheme. Two matters come to mind. A good number of Sentry auto policyholders have opted for the Payback Policy which returns to the policyholder a whopping 50% of the admittedly overpriced annual premium after five years have elapsed. In order to receive that cash refund, a policyholder must be absolutely claim free for the entire period — no claim whatsoever — nada. Also, the policyholder is required, per endorsement, to understand and accept that property damage will not cover any loss to his/her vehicle if the loss occurs while the policyholder is driving “under the influence.” Still, many policyholders had no claims. As the auto book is sold off, it is almost a guarantee that some, or many, or all Payback policyholders will NOT receive their 50% return of premium.

    Even more troubling is that Sentry may well be planning to “demutualize;” that is convert their legal status from a mutual company to a stock company. Rolling off tens of thousands of personal lines policyholders before a demutualization begins will deprive these policyholders of their share of the stock which policyholders ordinarily would receive when their current mutual company demutualizes. There are elements of fraud and other regulatory and criminal violations at play here.

    Pete McPartland — get ready for class action and a whole lot more.



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