You’ve decided your agency needs an AI phone system. Maybe you’re tired of calls going to voicemail. Maybe your last receptionist quit. Maybe you read our list of AI tools for insurance agencies and want to know how to actually pick one.
Whatever got you here, the next step is usually to book four or five vendor demos and see who sounds best. That is exactly the wrong way to do this.
Know your own numbers before you talk to anyone
The biggest mistake agencies make is jumping into demos without understanding their own phone situation first. Before you schedule a single call with a vendor, pull this data:
Your call volume. How many inbound calls does your agency get per day? Per week? Most small agencies guess low. Pull the actual number from your VoIP system or phone provider. 30 calls a day and 80 calls a day are different problems that need different solutions.
Your miss rate. What percentage of those calls go unanswered or hit voicemail? If you don’t track this, start now. Even one week of data is better than guessing. IBISWorld industry data puts the average for independent agencies at around 22% during business hours. Factor in evenings and weekends and it gets worse.
Your call mix. What are people actually calling about? Billing questions, claims, new quotes, COI requests, status updates? An AI system built for routing calls is different from one built to handle requests end to end. You need to know which problem you’re solving.
Your AMS. Which agency management system do you run? Applied Epic, AMS360, HawkSoft, EZLynx, something else? This single question will eliminate half the vendors immediately. If they don’t integrate natively with your AMS, the post-call documentation won’t work right. And documentation is where most of the real time savings come from. Hold us to this too. Our live connector list is public at /integrations/, and if your AMS is on the in-progress side we will tell you that on the call rather than after you sign.
Your languages. What languages do your customers speak? If your book is 30% Spanish-speaking, any system that only handles English is useless for a third of your calls.
Your current cost. What are you spending now? Receptionist salary, answering service fees, overtime, or just the silent cost of missed business nobody tracks? You need a baseline number to compare against.
The questions that separate good vendors from bad ones
Once you have your numbers, here’s what to ask on the demo call:
“Show me a call where your AI got confused.” Any vendor that only shows you perfect calls is hiding something. Every AI system has limits. The good ones recognize when they’re out of their depth and hand off to a human cleanly. The bad ones keep going and confuse your customer. How the system handles failure tells you more than how it handles success.
“What exactly lands in my AMS after a call?” Not what they say lands. What actually lands. Ask them to show you a real AMS entry from a real call. Is it a clean note with the caller’s name, policy reference, what they needed, and what happened? Or is it a raw transcript dump that someone on your team still has to read, edit, and summarize?
“What happens at 9 AM on Monday?” Monday morning is when every agency gets slammed. Six people call in the first ten minutes. Can the AI handle all six at the same time? Does voice quality drop? Does latency get worse? Peak load performance is where cheap systems fall apart.
“How do you handle compliance?” Insurance is regulated. Several states — California, Utah and New Jersey among them — require an AI to disclose that it is not human, and more add rules every session. Ask how the vendor handles disclosure in the states you write in. Ask about data storage, encryption, and whether your customer data is isolated or sitting in a shared environment alongside every other agency on the platform.
“What does the first month actually look like?” How long is setup? Who does the work? Do you map out your call flows yourself or do they help? A three-week onboarding with dedicated support is very different from a “here’s your login” email. Ask what the last three agencies they onboarded went through.
“Can I talk to an agency my size that’s been live for six months?” Not a testimonial on their website. A real agency owner you can call. Ask that reference what broke during setup, what surprised them, and what they wish they’d known before signing.
How to run a pilot that actually tells you something
Most vendors offer a free trial or pilot. The way most agencies run it is useless. They turn it on, let it run for two weeks, listen to a couple of calls, and decide based on gut feeling.
Here’s how to get real data out of a pilot:
Set a baseline first. Before the pilot starts, measure your current miss rate, average response time, and how long post-call documentation takes your team. Without a before number, the after number is meaningless.
Route real calls, not test calls. Calling the AI yourself with practice questions tells you nothing useful. Let your actual customers talk to it. That’s where the real edge cases are.
Audit the AMS entries. At the end of the pilot, pull every note the AI created in your AMS and have a CSR review them. Are they accurate? Complete? Would the CSR trust that note without rewriting it? Track the percentage that needed corrections.
Measure time saved, not just calls answered. A system that answers every call but creates extra cleanup work is not saving you anything. The metric that matters is: did your team’s total time spent on phone-related admin actually go down?
Watch for customer reactions. Did anyone complain? Did anyone hang up faster than usual? Did anyone say something positive? Your VoIP system probably tracks call duration and hang-up rates. Compare the pilot period to your baseline.
The pricing trap
AI phone system pricing in insurance is all over the place. You’ll see per-minute, per-call, per-seat, flat monthly, and hybrid models. They’re designed to be hard to compare on purpose.
The thing to watch is how pricing scales with your call volume. A per-minute model punishes you for long calls, which in insurance happen constantly. A 12-minute billing conversation costs you four times more than a quick status check, even though both needed to be answered. A per-call model is more predictable but you need to understand what counts as a “call.” Does a 15-second hang-up count the same as that 12-minute conversation?
A per-seat model gives you a fixed monthly cost regardless of how many calls come in. That’s useful for budgeting, especially if your volume is unpredictable or spikes during storm season or renewal periods. Your bill stays the same whether you get 30 calls a day or 80.
Ask every vendor the same question: “My agency gets 50 calls a day. What’s my monthly bill?” Then ask: “What if it jumps to 80 during storm season?” If the answer changes dramatically, make sure you understand why.
The honest part
We sell an AI phone system for insurance agencies. We have strong opinions about what makes a good one, and those opinions come from building ours. So take the framework above and apply it to us the same way you’d apply it to anyone else. Ask us the hard questions. Ask for references. Run a real pilot.
The agencies that end up happy with their AI phone system are the ones that did the homework before signing. The ones that regret it picked based on a 30-minute demo.
Book a 15-minute call if you want to walk through your numbers and see whether an AI phone system makes sense for your agency right now.
Georgijus Korobkovas
Founder & CEO