CDW Helps an Insurance Company Transform Its Contact Center
By optimizing Amazon Connect with customized configurations and system integrations, We Insure drives shorter call times and creates happier customers.
Poor visibility, too many manual processes, fragmented data across multiple systems: For a contact center team, they’re all red flags signaling that technology isn’t doing its job.
“You can’t provide great customer service if the platform you have for that purpose isn’t working like it should,” notes Joe Kurtz, executive vice president of operations at We Insure. He knows this because the independent insurance franchisor used to struggle with its own contact center solution. An early adopter of Amazon Connect, the company originally used the cloud platform in conjunction with a third-party system that extended its native functionality. But as Connect evolved with new tools and features over the four years We Insure used it, the company’s ability to take advantage of these capabilities was limited by the technology it had layered on top of it.
In addition, its Amazon contact center lacked integrations with the company’s other enterprise systems. As We Insure grew, its representatives found it increasingly difficult to meet the organization’s service-level targets. The company's franchise agencies — of which there are more than 150 across the United States — depend on the contact center as a shared service organization that works in support of their individual customers.
Agents, for example, had to toggle between multiple tools to access data in their customer relationship management (CRM) and workforce management (WFM) platforms, which led to inefficiencies that hurt productivity and affected customer service. “We hold ourselves to answering 80% of calls in 60 seconds or less,” Kurtz says. “The platform wasn’t letting us get there consistently, and our franchise owners deserve better than that — so we fixed the platform.”
Determined to stay with Amazon Connect if the system could be tailored to meet the company’s needs, the We Insure team reached out to Mission Cloud, a CDW company, in late summer 2025. Kurtz explains that although We Insure had never worked with CDW before, team members knew it had a reputation as a reliable Amazon Web Services partner.
“When we talked to them, it was clear right away that they knew what they were doing,” he says. “We went through our requirements and what we wanted to achieve, and after that, things moved really fast. CDW dove right in.”
“I’ve run operations through 30 years of technology projects, so I knew exactly where this one could go wrong. It didn’t — and the tight turnarounds are the part that impressed me most.”
— Joe Kurtz, Executive Vice President of Operations, We Insure
Solving Integration Challenges and Adding New Features
With We Insure’s goals clearly spelled out, the CDW team decided to approach the project in two distinct phases. First, it would tackle the contact center’s various integration-related challenges, and then it would configure the system with the latest Amazon features to enable automation and scalability moving forward. Throughout the process, CDW team members held weekly virtual meetings with Kurtz and his colleagues to review their progress and make adjustments as necessary, while a shared Microsoft Teams channel kept communication open for any concerns that needed attention right away.
Kurtz says the plan was a good fit for his team and even allowed his contact center agents to continue their work uninterrupted. “I’ve run operations through 30 years of technology projects, so I knew exactly where this one could go wrong. It didn’t — and the tight turnarounds are the part that impressed me most” he notes. “In this case, even with tight turnarounds, everything went really smoothly and efficiently.”
Among other things, the CDW experts completed system integrations with We Insure’s CRM, WFM and AMS platforms, and they strengthened the company’s existing Amazon Connect foundation by integrating voice and SMS channels. For agents, they introduced AI-supported workflows for quoting, renewals and service tasks, and they added features such as Amazon Nova Sonic, a speech-to-speech AI model that automates aspects of customer service. Agents were also equipped with a unified workspace that provides a comprehensive view of each customer. And to address the company’s QA difficulties, supervisors were provided with a new suite of tools for call monitoring and real-time coaching.
Today, We Insure’s upgraded platform has allowed the company to do away with its legacy touch-tone system. Its new architecture, stripped to the essentials, means “there’s no more ‘push one for this, push two for this’ and people pounding the zero in frustration,” Paulson explains. “It’s just, ‘I need help adding a new driver to my policy,’ or ‘I need to get a homeowner’s quote,’ and the technology follows the business logic to quickly route you to the right agent.”
From his perspective, Kurtz says the new system “is absolutely amazing.” Agents are no longer bouncing back and forth between multiple platforms as they try to do their work, and that’s allowed them to focus on their customers. “The agent sees the caller, the policy and the reason for the call on one screen before they say hello. That's the whole difference — they're spending their attention on the customer instead of on our software,” he says. “Overall, it’s a lot simpler — everything is there in front of them.”
Now, Kurtz reports, the system’s modern features are helping representatives work more efficiently, and everything from compliance to handle time is improving. All calls are automatically transcribed, and every transcript is automatically scanned for sensitive data that, if found, is instantly redacted. At the end of each call, an AI tool generates a summary and writes it back to the AMS, eliminating the manual note-taking that previously slowed every interaction. “Every call transcribed, every transcript scanned and redacted, notes written back automatically — that’s a contact center operating the way a modern one should,” he says. “We’re providing better service, and it’s made us a better company.”