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How a Canadian Brokerage Turned Phone Chaos Into Competitive Advantage
Cornerstone Insurance
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The Problem No One Could Answer
Picture this: You're running a thriving insurance brokerage in Saskatchewan. Your team handles 400-500 transactions daily. Clients walk in. Phones ring constantly. Your single receptionist is drowning.
"Our receptionist can't get to most calls. They're going to voicemail, which goes to a shared inbox. The response time is slower than we would like.", explained Brock Longworth, COO of Cornerstone Insurance Services. "The revenue from it doesn't justify us bringing on two, three, four receptionists."
But the numbers told a brutal story: Over 50% of calls went unanswered. Clients hit voicemail. Messages piled up in shared inboxes. Response times stretched longer than anyone wanted to admit.
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The Government Auto Dilemma
Cornerstone faced a uniquely Canadian challenge: Saskatchewan's government-run auto insurance created massive phone volume from customers needing license plates, registrations, and vehicle renewals.
The company needed intelligent routing that understood context - not just blind transfers.
The Breaking Point
Cornerstone tried everything: Opening overflow calls to the entire team (pulled high-value brokers from revenue work), hiring more staff (couldn't find talent in their small town), accepting the voicemail chaos (resulting in falling short of meeting customer service standards).
Beth Wiebe, Director of Operations, summed up the pain: "I live PTSD when it comes to phone systems."
When Brock heard about AI phone solutions at an agency owners group meeting, he knew immediately: "That's what we need."
The Transformation
Within weeks of implementing Sonant, the results were dramatic:
Staff productivity jumped 43% - from 70 tasks per day to 100. Why? Because Sonant pre-collects information like plate numbers and registration terms, cutting 25-30% of the workload off from transactions that typically take 8-12 minutes.
Beth Wiebe, Director of Operations, emphasizes the quality improvement: "Getting information correctly is huge for us. Right now, the human aspect comes into play—I collected the number, but I didn't send it to you. Or I got their name, but spelled it wrong. We get so much of that and it creates back and forth. If that gets eliminated, that's a big win."
Every single call gets answered, instantly, 24/7. No more 50% abandonment rates. No more voicemail backlogs.
Brokers stay focused on revenue work instead of fielding basic routing questions or government auto transactions.
The Results
The Intelligence Behind the Answer
Sonant doesn't just answer phones - it understands Cornerstone's complex workflows:
- EPIC Integration: Recognizes callers by phone number, pulls their policy information, routes to their assigned account executive
- Contextual Routing: Distinguishes between three government auto products that clients refer to in very similar needs, but each of which needs an unique routing
- Provincial Compliance: Canadian data residency built in from day one
"The accuracy is 100% on phone numbers," noted Diogo from Sonant's team. No more missing digits. No more "can you confirm this number?" back-and-forth.
The Client Experience
Perhaps most telling: Clients love it.
"I'd be elated if we started getting clients saying, hey, your receptionist is really nice", Brock shared. "That would be like a big win."
That win came faster than expected. The AI handles questions about hours and locations, transfers smoothly to brokers, and even maintains conversation context across multiple calls.
Cornerstone added an auto-dialer giving callers a choice: "Press 1 for immediate assistance from our AI, Press 2 to wait for reception." About two-thirds choose the AI. The others can wait up to 10-15 minutes.
For staff, the cultural shift was non-negotiable. "If you're not willing to embrace technology, you're probably not a cultural fit here," Brock states plainly. "We do a lot of tech initiatives, so anyone still on our team is comfortable with it."
The Unexpected Benefits
What started as a solution to answer phones evolved into something more powerful. Brock reflects: "I'm finding that the potential of this thing to take easy phone calls and not have a human being disturbed is probably very vast. I feel like transferring phone calls was probably just the tip of the iceberg."
The team discovered the AI could handle coverage questions with perfect regulatory compliance, direct tenant insurance inquiries to self-service options better suited to that type of transaction, and even identify which callers require broker attention versus routine processing.
Perhaps most valuable: complete visibility into previously unknown call volume. "We're now aware of how many calls were hitting our office that we weren't even aware of before," Beth notes. "At least now they're getting the bot and we're able to get back to those clients."
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