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Century Insurance Consultants didn't lose one employee. They lost three - including their receptionist - right as a hard insurance market was driving call volume up across their book of business.
That combination is brutal for a small agency. Co-owners Eric Porter and Matthew Love found themselves running a 14-person P&C agency in Pennsylvania with no dedicated front line. Whoever was free picked up the phone, whether or not the call had anything to do with them, then had to track down and transfer it to the right person.
They're getting taken away from tasks they might otherwise be working on to answer the phone
Eric explained.
They might answer a phone call that has nothing to do with them, and then they've got to transfer that call to the person that's supposed to be handling that account.
Multiply that across a full day, and it added up to real lost time for producers and CSRs who already had their own accounts to manage.
The instinct in that situation is to rush a rehire. Eric and Matthew took a different approach: before backfilling the receptionist role, they looked at what AI could take off their plate first.
They evaluated more than one option. What made the decision easy was specificity. Sonant's AI receptionist is built exclusively for P&C insurance agencies - not retrofitted from a general-purpose assistant. During evaluation, Sonant's team pointed out the real risk with generalist AI tools: models trained across a dozen unrelated industries have more room to guess wrong on the exact judgment calls a P&C call requires. Eric didn't need convincing on that point - he'd already run into it.
There's too much information
he said, describing exactly the failure mode they were trying to avoid.
The other deciding factor was routing. Century's personal-lines book is split alphabetically across CSRs, and getting a caller to the right person - not just a person - was the whole point of fixing this. That's a workflow most generalist tools have never been asked to handle. Sonant built it directly into Century's setup from day one.
From the first kickoff call to going live took 17 business days. For an agency already short-staffed, that mattered - there was no bandwidth for a long, drawn-out transition sitting on top of everything else already falling on Eric and Matthew's plates.
By the time they went live, routing and policy lookups were already working, pulling the information they needed straight from their AMS (Agency Management System) - Applied Epic system.
Century treated the go-live as low-risk, and for good reason: the few hiccups that came up in the first week were resolved the same day, using real call examples instead of a support ticket queue. No waiting, no back-and-forth - just fast, direct fixes.
The bigger win wasn't a line item. It was getting a producer-heavy team out of reception duty entirely.
Matthew summed up how quickly the team settled into trusting it, just a day after going live:
I don't see any reason to not be live. I'm just going to adapt and adjust as it goes.
Eric put it plainly, thinking ahead to how the rest of the team would take to it:
Our staff is embracing it - they don't want to answer the phone first. That alone was helpful.
Century's situation is a common one right now: a hard market driving call volume up at the exact moment hiring is difficult. The instinct is to treat every open seat as urgent. Century's experience suggests a different order of operations - get a system in place that's actually built for how an insurance agency runs, let it take the interruption-heavy work off the team's plate, and then decide what human hiring still needs to happen.
If your agency is short-staffed and every call is pulling someone off their real job, it's worth seeing what a P&C-specific AI receptionist actually looks like on a live call.
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