Every customer service team has a number: the call volume above which things start to break. For Foremost, a Canadian insurance company, that number arrived faster than expected. Volume was growing 15% year over year. Wait times were climbing. And the operations manager, Ken Friesen, was facing a familiar but uncomfortable choice: hire more agents, or find a smarter way to handle the load.
They chose a third option: replace the repetitive work with AI.
The Problem With Inbound Call Volumes
Insurance customer service looks, from the outside, like a complex job. But when you look at the actual call log, a significant portion of it isn't complex at all. At Foremost, roughly 60% of inbound calls were one of three things: a policy inquiry ("what does my plan cover?"), a claims status check ("where is my claim?"), or a billing question ("why did my premium change?"). Every single one required a live agent, a hold queue, and 7 minutes on average to resolve.
Peak hours meant 20-minute wait times. The team was spending most of its capacity answering questions that, in principle, had deterministic answers: information that lived in systems the agents were just reading out loud.
What an AI Voice Agent Actually Does
The solution Dafinitiq built wasn't a menu-driven IVR system ("press 1 for billing, press 2 for claims"). Those systems are universally hated and do nothing to reduce agent workload, they just delay the inevitable transfer. What Dafinitiq deployed was a conversational AI voice agent: a system that answers the phone, understands what the caller is saying in plain language, retrieves the relevant information from Foremost's CRM and policy database, and responds naturally.
For the 60% of calls that are routine inquiries, the AI resolves them completely. For the 40% that genuinely need a human (a complex claim dispute, an upset customer, an unusual situation), the system transfers to the right agent immediately, with a full transcript of the conversation already on the agent's screen.
The Integration That Made It Work
The technical part that most AI deployments get wrong is integration. A voice agent that can't actually look up a customer's policy isn't useful, it's just a smarter hold message. Dafinitiq connected the voice agent directly to Foremost's existing CRM and policy management system. That integration took three days, and it's what allowed the system to give specific, accurate answers instead of generic ones.
The whole deployment, from first call to live production traffic, took one week. There was no disruption to existing call flows during the transition. Calls were gradually routed through the new system as confidence in its accuracy was confirmed.
The Numbers After Year One
Foremost's annual cost reduction came from two places: fewer agent-hours spent on tier-1 calls (labor cost reduction), and no need to hire additional agents to handle the volume growth (headcount avoidance). Combined, those came to $40,000 in year one, a figure that will grow as call volume continues to increase and the AI system scales without additional cost.
The customer satisfaction figure, 94% on AI-handled calls, was the result that surprised the team most. The expectation was that customers would prefer a human. What the data showed was that customers preferred fast and accurate, and the AI delivered both.
What This Means for Your Business
The pattern here isn't unique to insurance. Any business with high inbound call volume where a significant portion of calls are informational, not complex problem-solving, is a candidate for the same approach. The economics tend to work out similarly: the AI handles the repetitive load, humans handle everything else, and total cost goes down while service quality improves.
The only question is whether the volume justifies the deployment. For Foremost, with thousands of calls per month, the ROI was immediate. For smaller operations, the calculation is different, but the underlying technology works the same way.
If you want to understand how this might apply to your business specifically, a 30-minute discovery call is the fastest way to find out.