Should You Outsource Customer Service at Your Insurance Agency?

Your customer service team is the frontline of your business. They are the ones building trust during a claim, explaining coverage details, and retaining clients year after year. In fact, over 45% of respondents in a 2022 Kubra survey named it one of the top factors when selecting their insurance provider.

While maintaining quality service is the priority for most insurance companies, managing your entire contact center in-house is challenging. You’re likely combining the high costs of staffing and training with unpredictable spikes in call volume during renewal seasons or after a major weather event.

This constant shift between maintaining service quality and controlling operational expenses is exactly why so many of your peers are asking an often-ignored question: Should you outsource customer service at your insurance agency?

Why Insurance Agencies Are Exploring Outsourced Customer Service

The daily grind in an insurance agency is dominated by a high volume of repetitive, yet critical, inquiries. Your team spends countless hours on policy updates, explaining billing cycles, and providing claims status follow-ups.

These tasks are essential, but they don’t always require the deep expertise of your licensed agents. This creates a fundamental inefficiency, where you’re paying a premium for specialized talent to perform everyday administrative work rather than focusing on complex risk assessments, new policy sales, and similar tasks.

So when you hear about agency leaders turning to outsourcing, it’s not just about a simple cost-cut. It’s actually a smart operational move, driven by the need for faster response times, sustainable control, and a solution to the talent shortage.

This is a growing trend among modern insurance agencies that understand that once you get those routine tasks out of the way, proper growth strategies come into play.

Benefits of Outsourcing for Insurance Customer Support

Outsourcing your insurance customer support isn’t just about having someone else take your calls. It also gives you a unique edge that puts you ahead of competitors. Here’s how:

• Constant availability: You get to offer extended hours or even 24/7 coverage without the nightmare of managing overnight shifts in-house. This means a policyholder can report a fender bender at 8 p.m. or get answers to billing questions over a weekend. 
• Expert handling or routine inquiries: When you’re able to delegate tier-1 inquiries like policy details, payment questions, and routine claims status updates to a team trained specifically on your agency’s processes, it guarantees accurate and consistent answers for your clients. This also frees your licensed agents to focus on more complex tasks.
• Faster claims lifecycle: Every agency knows how important speed is in claims processing. With an outsourced team, your clients enjoy proactive, faster follow-ups and status updates. If your customers don’t have to worry about anxiety when it’s time to make their claims, you’ve done an amazing job.
• No more seasonal overload: Peak periods without the stress? Check. Storm season surge? Check. Even if it's the annual enrollment window, you can scale support instantly to maintain service levels and customer satisfaction when it matters most. 
• Expanded reach: If your agency serves a much wider demographic, you can take advantage of customer service providers with bilingual support. That way, you can ensure that all customers are served in the language they are most comfortable with.

Risks and Concerns, And How to Manage Them

There’s a reason why outsourcing was a once-ignored option in the insurance world, and we would be doing you a disservice if we didn’t address the hesitations head-on. 

We get it, as an insurance agency, your reputation is built on trust, compliance, and security, and the thought of handing over customer interactions is bound to bring legit concerns at first. The most common fears include:

• Compliance and data privacy: Insurance is a heavily regulated industry, and there’s a risk that an agent may misspeak on a recorded line or mishandle sensitive personal information.
• Brand misalignment: Will an outsourced team represent your agency’s values? No one wants that “scripted robot” effect, as it destroys that personal touch you want to be known for.
• Inconsistency: There’s also the worry that call handling times will increase or resolution rates will drop, which would frustrate your customers.

While it’s good to acknowledge these risks, it’s also worth noting that they only happen when you’re with the wrong partner. The right one doesn’t just eliminate the risks; they build a customer support framework that makes your agency more secure and consistent than ever. 

Here’s how quality providers manage things:

• Mitigating compliance risks: Look for partners with robust, secure technology and a commitment to certifications like SOC 2. They should operate with clear, documented playbooks for every interaction.
• Ensuring brand alignment: The solution lies in “localized” talent. By partnering with a provider that uses US-based agents who are native English speakers and trained specifically on your brand’s tone, you ensure an authentic customer experience.
• Maintaining control and quality: The right partner will provide you with detailed performance dashboards and call recordings, giving you more visibility into your customer interactions than you may have had with an in-house team.

It’s also worth noting that outsourcing isn’t perfect for every agency. If your model relies on a single agent handling every client interaction from start to finish, it may not be for you. But for most agencies looking to scale efficiently while protecting their service quality, the risks can be managed and may even help drive your business forward.

5 Signs It’s Time to Outsource Your Customer Service

It’s sometimes difficult to see the warning signs when you’re in the thick of it. But if you find yourself nodding along to more than one of the points below, it’s a strong indicator that your current model is straining and that outsourcing could be just the relief you need.

Take a moment to assess your own situation: 

• You consistently miss calls or messages during (or after) office hours.
• Your core team spends over half their time on repetitive tier-1 and tier-2 questions.
• You struggle to hire and train new support staff fast enough to meet demands.
• Your Customer Satisfaction (CSAT) scores are stagnant or dropping.
• You need to scale for a busy season but can’t justify full-time roles year-round.

If these scenarios feel familiar, you’re not alone. These are the exact operational pressures that lead successful insurance agencies to seek a partner.

What to Look For in an Insurance-Savvy Outsourcing Partner

The truth is that not all outsourcing providers are equipped to handle the unique demands of the insurance sector. Choosing the wrong partner can even worsen the very problems you were trying to solve.

If you’ve decided to outsource customer service, use this checklist to make sure they are a true extension of your agency, not just a random call center:

• Familiarity with insurance workflows: The partner should demonstrate a clear understanding of core insurance processes. Their agents should be ready to handle the specifics of your business from day one, whether it's policy serving or claims intake.
• Proactive compliance and data security: Insurance is an industry built on trust, so this is non-negotiable. Your partner must have strong data privacy protocols, secure systems, and an understanding of the relevant regulations.
• Clear escalation paths: A reliable partner knows their limits, so they must have clearly defined escalation paths to smoothly transfer complex issues to your licensed in-house experts.
• Empathetic, problem-solving agents: Look for agents who can work confidently with sensitive customer data, show empathy during high-stress situations, and resolve issues efficiently. These human skills are critical in insurance support, where trust, discretion, and sound judgment matter as much as technical knowledge.
• Experience with industry tools: While this is not always a requirement, a partner experienced with common insurance CRM or CCaaS platforms can seriously reduce onboarding time and improve accuracy. This will then lead to smoother transitions and even better service.

How ShyftOff Supports Insurance Agencies with Scalable Support

ShyftOff offers a fundamentally different approach to insurance agencies tired of traditional outsourcing trade-offs.

We are not a legacy BPO. We are an Agentic Workforce Delivery Platform™ designed to synchronize a scalable, high-quality human workforce with your specific customer demands. This means you get the expertise and empathy of people, powered by the precision of technology.

With ShyfrOff, you’ll get to enjoy benefits that directly address your primary challenges: 

• High-quality, US-based agents: We connect you with our global network of over 17,000 verified, active agents. Every interaction, from a simple policy question to a complex claims follow-up, is handled with a human and professional touch. 
• Flexibility to scale instantly without long-term contracts: The insurance business and fluctuating call volumes go hand in hand. With ShyftOff, you can ramp up coverage in real time for storm seasons or open enrollment and scale down during quieter periods. You never have to worry about paying for idle time again.
• Built-in compliance and continuous quality assurance: Security is non-negotiable. The ShyftOff platform is built with PCI-DSS, HIPAA, and SOC 2 compliance safeguards. Even better, our platform features 24/7 QA, where Agentic AI monitors agent interactions 24/7, ensuring sustained quality scores of 98% or higher.
• Performance-based delivery, not hourly billing: Traditional models charge you for an agent’s time, whether they are on a call or waiting for one. Our model is built around productive time. You only pay for the time agents are actively handling customer interactions, in queue, or doing after-call work. This can lead to 25%–55% cost savings compared to traditional staffing.

Stop choosing between service quality and operational cost. Contact ShyftOff to see how our platform can deliver a perfectly staffed contact center for your agency.

In-House vs. Outsourced: What’s Right for Your Agency?

When it comes to choosing between building an in-house team or partnering with a specialist like ShyftOff, it isn’t about which is universally “better” but about what aligns best with your agency. Here’s a quick comparison guide to help you:

‍Control and oversight

• In-house team: You get direct, hands-on management and oversight
• ShyftOff: Oversight is managed through a platform in a few clicks with transparent dashboards and performance data

‍Operational cost

• In-house team: Expect high fixed costs due to salaries, benefits, and infrastructure
• ShyftOff: Costs are variable, predictable costs based on productive time only

‍Scalability and flexibility

• In-house team: Slow and expensive to scale up or down
• ShyftOff: On-demand scaling in days to meet seasonal spikes or growth

‍Expertise and training

• In-house team: Builds deep agency-specific knowledge, but takes time 
• ShyftOff: Teams are rapidly trained on your workflows with built-in QA for consistency 

‍Risk management

• In-house team: Full responsibility for hiring, compliance, and data security is on you
• ShyftOff: Risk is shared with built-in compliance and secure infrastructure 

As you can now see, both an in-house team and outsourcing have their benefits, but it’s crucial to remember that this doesn’t have to be an all-or-nothing decision. 

Some of the most successful insurance agencies around today adopt a hybrid model, where they keep their core, licensed team in-house to handle complex policy reviews and sales while outsourcing routine tier-1 support, after-hours calls, and surge capacity.

With this approach, every customer gets the right level of expertise at the right time, while saving on costs. Contact ShyftOff today for a complimentary discovery session to see if a fully-managed or hybrid support model is the right fit for your agency’s goals.

Final Thoughts: Outsourcing Can Be a Growth Lever, If Done Right

Even when you outsource customer service, your agency remains very much part of the client care process. When done with the right partner, outsourcing becomes a powerful tool for growth because you get to offer better support services to your customers and save costs, while also freeing up your internal resources to focus on other growth drivers.

Everything is down to choosing a flexible, reliable platform that moves beyond the legacy BPO model and offers you a genuine understanding of the insurance industry, US-based agents, robust compliance, and a commitment to aligning with your brand’s identity.

Ready to see how a modern outsourcing solution can take your insurance agency to the next level? Contact ShyftOff today and find the right support for your needs.