Insights for Sales Leaders
Best practices, industry trends, and strategies to optimize your call center operations
Customer Story
2 min read
How Century Benefits Tested Onyx Before Moving the Agency
Switching platforms is a big decision. You're betting your operation on software you haven't fully stress-tested, asking your team to learn new workflows, and hoping nothing breaks along the way.
Andrew Eachon, owner of Century Benefits, wasn't willing to take that bet all at once. So he didn't.
Starting Small With One Team
Century Benefits runs multiple agent teams remotely and out of offices in Portland and Vancouver. When Eachon started evaluating Onyx Platform, he saw an opportunity to test without disrupting his core operation. Rather than migrating everyone at once, he brought a single sales team on first.
That team was already managing their own workflows and had flexibility in how they operated. It was a chance to see how the platform performed in real conditions, with real calls and real compliance requirements, before making a bigger commitment.
If Onyx delivered, he'd have months of real data to justify moving the rest of the agency. If it didn't, the core operation would keep running without interruption.
Five months later, the data was clear.
What Five Months Revealed
The improvements showed up in day-to-day workflows and overall performance. On Onyx, customer information loaded automatically when a call connected. Scripts appeared based on what the agent was selling. When a policy came through from Sunfire, the enrollment data pre-populated so agents could review and submit in a few clicks instead of rebuilding the record from scratch. After-call notes wrote themselves.
The platform also gave sales managers a cleaner view of performance. Eachon's team worked with Onyx to customize their scoreboard to show only what mattered: inbound calls taken, policies sold, closing percentage, and billable hours. Five data points on a TV screen, refreshing every 15 minutes.
None of this was theoretical anymore. Eachon had months of real performance data from agents doing real work.
Moving the Whole Agency
After the pilot, moving the whole agency felt obvious.
The risk that made Eachon hesitant in the first place had been tested and answered. He knew how onboarding worked because he'd already done it. He knew which questions agents would ask because the initial team had already asked them. He knew what training looked like and how long it took for people to get comfortable.
Century Benefits brought everyone on in early 2026. The agency's operations manager handled the rollout from one of their offices. On launch day, only a handful of last-minute questions came up. "Pretty smooth, everybody's happy," they told the Onyx team on their daily checkin call.
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Insight
Onyx Data Shows That Coaching Improves Agent Conversion
This is a short version of The Onyx Operator — regular insights delivered to agency owners and leaders on Onyx Platform.
We looked across agencies that lean hard on live call monitoring. Two patterns showed up. Some managers go wide — a few minutes spread across many agents. Others go deep — long, focused listening sessions with a smaller group. Wide-and-shallow barely moved the numbers. The deep sessions are where conversion actually climbed, and it scaled with intensity: the most-coached agents in those agencies improved conversion by 3.5 percentage points (see the chart at the top for details).
The play the strongest agencies run is to concentrate their coaching firepower — fewer agents, longer sessions, aimed at the people most likely to improve. Onyx Listen & Whisper is what makes those deep sessions practical: managers monitor live calls and coach in-ear in real time, without breaking the call.
Insight
Why No One Picks Up (It's Not Your Agents)
An agent makes 120 dials and talks to four people. The instinct is to blame the list, the script, or the agent. Usually it's none of those. It's the number they're calling from.
Carriers and call-labeling networks watch how numbers behave. A number that places high volume with a low answer rate gets flagged — "Spam Likely," "Scam Likely," or simply "Unknown Caller." Once that label sticks, it doesn't matter how good your leads or your pitch are. The phone rings, the screen says spam, and the call goes unanswered. Our own data shows a number drifting below roughly a 15–20% answer rate usually has a reputation problem.
You can't out-dial that. You have to fix the number itself. Here's how Onyx does it automatically.
Local presence
When Onyx places an outbound call, it matches your caller ID to the area code of the person you're calling. A 206 lead sees a 206 number. That is personal and relatable.
Rotation, not burnout
Instead of hammering one line until it's flagged, Onyx spreads dials across a pool of numbers. When average volume per number climbs past a healthy threshold, Onyx provisions another local number and adds it to the pool — before any single number burns out.
Carrier trust, built in
Every number Onyx provisions is automatically registered with the carriers for the three things that keep it trusted: SHAKEN/STIR (proving the call really comes from you), a branded caller-ID name (so your agency shows up, not "Unknown"), and spam-prevention registration. That's the difference between a number carriers trust and one they quietly throttle.
Agents stay on live calls
Onyx runs its own answering-machine detection, so agents connect to people, not voicemails. Their time goes to conversations — which keeps your numbers' answer rates, and their reputation, healthy.
Guardrails that protect you
Timezone-aware calling hours, a cap of three call attempts per person per 24 hours, and automatic DNC scrubbing all prevent the over-dialing patterns that get numbers flagged in the first place.
The bottom line
None of this requires a telecom expert on staff. You don't manage area codes, registrations, or number health. Onyx handles the reputation layer so your agents can do the one thing that grows the business: talk to people.
For a look at what happens the moment a call connects, read What Actually Happens When You Make or Receive a Call on a Cloud-Based Dialer.
Guide
Stop Pulling Reports. Just Ask Onyx
Most agency leaders we talk to are flying half-blind on the numbers that run their business before coming onto Onyx Platform. Not because they want to, but because getting to answers means exporting spreadsheets, fighting a rigid dashboard, or waiting on whoever can "build the report."
We built the Onyx AI Assistant to end that. Open it from anywhere in the platform and ask, in plain English:
"How many policies did Kim's team sell yesterday?"
"Who were our top five performers last week?"
"What's the average talk time per agent this month?"
"Show me conversion rate by lead source."
You get the answer in seconds. No report builder, no SQL, no waiting on an analyst.
Built for insurance, no generic chat bot
Ask about MAPD, ACA, or PDP production. Slice by carrier, by campaign source, by the states your agents are licensed in. The Assistant speaks the language of telesales agencies because we've run one ourselves.
Your data, your answers
Every question runs against your own agency's live data — current to this minute, not last night's export.
The agencies getting the most out of Onyx treat the Assistant like a teammate: a quick "how are we tracking today?" between calls instead of a Monday-morning report scramble. That's the difference between running an agency on modern technology and running it on guesswork.
Curious what your floor looks like right now? Just ask.
Guide
Your Agency Data Should Answer You
Running an insurance agency means constantly needing numbers. How many policies did we close this morning? Which agents haven't logged in? What's our closing rate on the new Medicare campaign this week?
Most agency leaders track these down one of two ways: they wait for a report, or they dig through dashboards that weren't built for quick answers. By the time the data is in front of them, the window to act has often closed.
Ask, Don't Hunt
Ask Onyx is the AI assistant built into the Onyx Platform. It does one thing unusually well: it answers operational questions about your agency in plain English, instantly.
You type a question. You get an answer.
How many ancillary policies did we sell yesterday, by lead source? Which agents haven't logged in today? What's the closing rate for each agent on the Medicare campaign this week?
These aren't canned report exports. Ask Onyx queries your live call, disposition, policy, and agent activity data and returns the answer directly—in the same workspace your team already uses.
The Questions That Move Needles
The questions Ask Onyx handles most often are the ones that drive daily decisions:
Agent activity: Who's online? Who's been idle? How long since an agent went offline?
Sales tracking: Core vs. ancillary policies closed today? Broken down by lead source?
Agent performance: What's a specific agent's closing rate, by state or campaign?
Campaign health: Dials, contacts, and voicemails on a specific campaign this morning?
None of these require building a report or waiting for someone to pull data. They're answered in seconds.
Why It Changes How You Operate
When your data answers you directly, you stop working in delayed cycles. You catch the slow start before it becomes a slow day. You see which lead source is underperforming while there's still time to act.
The data has always been there. What's changed is that you no longer need a report to reach it.
Talk to us if you want to see what Ask Onyx looks like inside your agency.