Automate Insurance Status Checks with a Custom Voice System
You can hire Syntora to develop a custom system for your insurance status workflow. It uses AI to provide real-time policy updates over the phone without human intervention.
The system's complexity depends on your data sources. Integrating with a single Agency Management System (AMS) with a modern API is straightforward. Connecting to three separate carrier portals plus a legacy internal database requires more complex data mapping and error handling.
We built a voice AI for a regional insurance agency with 6 adjusters handling 200 claims per week. The system went live in 4 weeks and cut status check call times from an average of 6 minutes to 90 seconds, freeing up agents to handle complex claims.
What Problem Does This Solve?
Most agencies first try off-the-shelf IVR builders like Twilio Studio. These tools are rigid. They follow a simple press-one-for-X script but cannot understand natural language. If a caller asks, "Is my auto policy still active?" instead of following the prompt exactly, the system fails and routes them to a human, defeating the purpose.
A common failure scenario involves API latency. An agency configured a basic IVR to look up policy numbers in their AMS. The API call took 8 seconds. This long, silent pause caused 70% of callers to hang up or mash zero to speak to an agent, increasing frustration and inbound call load. These IVR tools lack the sophisticated error handling needed to manage slow or failing external APIs gracefully.
More advanced platforms like Voiceflow or Botpress are better at conversations but are not built for telephony first. Adapting them for phone calls introduces latency and requires workarounds for speech-to-text inaccuracies. They often lack the low-level control needed for production systems, like implementing a circuit breaker that stops hitting a carrier's failing API for 5 minutes.
How Does It Work?
We begin by building resilient API clients in Python to connect to your data sources, whether it's an AMS like Applied Epic or multiple carrier portals. We use the httpx library for async requests and proper timeout handling. For one client, we aggregated data from three carrier APIs and their internal AMS into a unified schema stored in a Supabase database for fast lookups.
The system's core is a FastAPI application deployed on AWS Lambda. When a call arrives, we use Amazon Transcribe for speech-to-text. The transcript is sent to the Claude 3 Sonnet API, which extracts the caller's intent and any entities like a policy number or name. This entire recognition and extraction process completes in under 800ms. We found Claude is 25% more accurate than GPT-3.5 for extracting structured details from conversational speech.
Once the policy status is retrieved from the AMS, a response is generated and converted to audio using a low-latency engine like Amazon Polly. The entire interaction, from the moment the caller finishes speaking to the system beginning its audio response, takes under 2 seconds. The audio is streamed back to the caller's phone using a telephony provider like Twilio.
We implement production-grade monitoring using structlog for queryable logs and AWS CloudWatch. Every API call, intent recognition, and error is logged. We configure alarms that send a Slack notification if the API error rate exceeds 2% in a 5-minute window or if average latency surpasses 3 seconds. This setup costs under $50 per month for 5,000 calls and catches issues before customers do.
What Are the Key Benefits?
Live in 4 Weeks, Not 6 Months
A focused 4-week build gets a production system handling live calls. Avoids the long sales cycles and complex configurations of enterprise platforms.
Fixed-Price Build, Zero Per-Call Fees
One-time development cost and low, predictable AWS hosting fees. You pay for raw cloud usage, not a vendor's markup on every call.
You Get the Full Source Code
The entire Python codebase is delivered to your GitHub repository. No vendor lock-in, no black boxes. Your system is a business asset you fully own.
Monitoring Catches Errors Before Customers Do
We configure CloudWatch alarms for latency and error rates. You get a Slack alert if a carrier's API is down, allowing you to get ahead of the problem.
Connects Directly to Your Existing AMS
Direct API integration with your Agency Management System like Vertafore or Applied Epic. No manual data synchronization or separate dashboards are needed.
What Does the Process Look Like?
Week 1: System Discovery and API Access
You provide read-only API credentials for your AMS and carrier portals. We map the data flow and define the exact voice interaction scripts and failure states.
Weeks 2-3: Core System Development
We build the FastAPI application, integrate it with Claude and speech services, and connect to your data sources. You receive a private phone number for testing.
Week 4: Deployment and Testing
We deploy the system to your AWS account and connect it to your primary phone line. Your team tests with real-world scenarios for one week to ensure accuracy.
Post-Launch: Monitoring and Handoff
We monitor system performance and error rates for 30 days post-launch. You receive a complete runbook with architectural diagrams and monitoring instructions.
Frequently Asked Questions
- How much does a custom insurance voice agent cost?
- The final cost depends on the number of data sources and the conversational complexity. A system for a single, well-documented API is typically a 2-week build. One that queries three different carrier portals and handles follow-up questions about billing is a 4-week project. We provide a fixed-price quote after our initial discovery call.
- What happens if a carrier's API is down or a policy isn't found?
- We build specific logic for these failures. If a carrier API times out, the system says, "I'm sorry, I'm unable to connect to that carrier's system right now. Please try again later." If a policy number is not found after two attempts, the call is automatically transferred to a human agent with the caller's phone number.
- How is this different from using a drag-and-drop IVR builder?
- IVR builders are for simple phone trees ("Press 1 for sales"). They fail with natural language. Our system uses the Claude API to understand unstructured requests like, "Hi, I just want to check if my auto policy is still good." This natural interaction reduces caller frustration and lowers hang-up rates from over 50% with IVRs to under 10%.
- What languages and accents can the system understand?
- We use Amazon Transcribe, which supports over 100 languages and dialects. We can specify the primary language (e.g., US English, Spanish) and the system is resilient to most regional accents. For insurance-specific terms, like unique product names, we can provide custom vocabulary lists to improve recognition accuracy for your agency's terminology.
- Do we need an engineer on staff to maintain this?
- No. The system is deployed on AWS Lambda, which requires no server management. We provide 30 days of post-launch support and a detailed runbook. For long-term peace of mind, we offer an optional flat monthly maintenance plan. This plan covers bug fixes, dependency updates, and minor changes needed when your carriers update their APIs.
- How do you ensure our customer's policy information is private?
- The system is built and deployed entirely within your own AWS account. Syntora never stores any of your customer data on our systems. All data, from call transcripts to policy details, remains in your secure cloud infrastructure. We configure IAM roles with least-privilege access, and all data in transit is encrypted using TLS 1.2.
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