An AI phone assistant for insurance brokers

07A practical guide

A practical guide to running an AI receptionist in a brokerage

Once the assistant is live, the value comes from a handful of decisions only you can make: which calls it should fully handle, how a claim moves from the phone to a file, and where the firm line sits between answering a question and giving advice. This guide walks a broker through rolling it out, capturing leads that pay for it, and proving it earned its keep.

1. 1

   Roll it out one call type at a time

   You don't have to route the whole switchboard at once. Most brokerages start by sending after-hours and lunch-cover calls to the assistant, where the alternative is voicemail anyway, then add overflow when every line is ringing during a consultation. Listen back to a week before you widen it: check that policy numbers are captured cleanly, that the qualifying questions sound like yours, and that escalations land with the right advisor. By the time it answers your main number you've already heard it handle real clients and you know where it hands off. Treat the first two weeks as tuning, not a launch.

2. 2

   Make every lead arrive pre-qualified

   A prospect calling for cover is comparison-shopping, so the assistant's job is to keep the conversation alive and arrive on your desk already sorted. Decide the four or five questions that actually change how you'd quote — line of business, whether there's a current policy and its renewal date, rough sum insured or vehicle, and how soon they need it bound — and let the assistant ask exactly those, no more. The payoff is that a lead reaches you tagged by product and urgency rather than as 'someone called about insurance', so a fresh auto enquiry with a renewal next week jumps the queue while a vague price-check waits. Book it straight into your advisory calendar so there's no callback tag to chase.

3. 3

   Set the claims-and-advice line before it's tested

   Two rules carry the whole deployment for a broker. First, claims intake: write down the fields every report must capture — name and policy number, date, time and place, what happened, third-party details and photos to follow — and which losses are urgent enough to forward live (injury, total loss, liability with another party) versus logged for a next-day callback. Second, the advice boundary, which must be absolute: the assistant answers what's on file — renewal dates, premium changes, documents needed, who handles a changeover — but it never confirms what is or isn't covered and never gives binding advice. Anything touching a coverage decision goes straight to a licensed advisor with the call summarized and the file open. To know it's working, watch three honest numbers: leads captured outside opening hours, claims logged complete on the first call, and how fast urgent losses reached a person. If those climb while missed-call callbacks fall, the assistant is paying for itself.