The insurance industry relies on speedy, streamlined communication to address the millions of service-related policy calls received each year. Between juggling phone calls, document management, and case resolution, insurance agents need to move with agility — but if communication slips through the cracks, it can spell trouble. Sammons Financial Group, an enterprise life insurance and annuity carrier active across 49 states, knows this all too well.
We spoke with Andrew Walling, the Assistant Vice President of Strategy Implementation and Support at Sammons. Walling has been leading a multi-year initiative to improve the sustainability and scalability of his operations. The company has hired 1,000 new employees in the past five years, and with such a rapid scale-up, Walling knew he needed to approach his business strategy through a new lens.
“We want to think about how we can do business differently,” Walling said. “Within the insurance industry, we use lots of different systems. The question is, how do we maintain the connection between them all?”
The answer is with Slack: Sammons leverages Slack as its work operating system to service customers faster, streamline operations, and accelerate case resolution times.

“Slack living up to the hype has been the most shocking thing. While you often encounter software that doesn’t meet expectations, Slack truly delivers as promised.”
Slack helps Sammons streamline 2M annual calls in a single pane of glass
Insurance agents typically communicate with their clients on the phone. But during those calls, agents must toggle between a variety of applications on their desktops.
“Every year, we have over 2 million phone calls, and everyone taking a call has 17 applications up — between call recording, region tracking, and more,” Walling said. “Imagine someone calls in but they need to call different departments just to have an initial conversation, whether it’s about a death claim or a trust document. Our team would have to put this person on hold, have a conversation on a different line, re-engage with the caller, maybe pivot again. And that’s just a lot to manage.”
By using Slack to streamline those calls, Walling and his team were able to bring those disjointed actions into a single pane of glass. The result? Service teams could remove five of those applications, creating faster, more productive processes that reduced the need to constantly context switch. And by switching to huddles, sales team members no longer needed to call each other on their cellphones.
“Our team has fully embraced the productivity of Slack. Huddles are beating out Teams and Google Meet. You can ask questions and get an immediate response, you can link knowledge bases to get answers. It’s been amazing,” he said. “The teams are working more efficiently, and employee satisfaction is up.”
Case swarming empowers faster, better case resolutions for customers
Walling noted that swarming in Slack played a key role in reducing the number of apps call agents needed. It also helped the team resolve policyholder service issues much faster than before.
In a swarming model, one agent resolves a client case from start to finish rather than handing it off to the next relevant agent in a tiered system. When other experts need to weigh in or an issue needs escalation, the agent can loop in the right resources to solve the issue. This model has shown a dramatic impact on improving customer wait times and satisfaction.
“Case swarming has made a profound difference in our business,” Walling said. “Before, when trying to solve these problems, it took days because we were emailing and calling, which naturally leads to longer wait times. Now those resolutions are almost instantaneous, because you are taking the waiting out of the process.”
Walling added that because swarming is possible directly within Slack, the team no longer needs to toggle between apps.
“Case swarming has been a game changer. We got Slack integrated into the Lightning console, and it’s been amazing to have everything connected. Someone can start an inquiry in the console, and it’s incredible to see how we can immediately take action for these cases.”
Slashing SLA and onboarding time gets easier with Slack
Every minute counts when handling client service requests, which is why Walling’s team leveraged the power of Slack to shave down SLA completion time.
Prior to using Slack, SLAs were typically finished in seven days. With Slack in the mix, Sammons was able to cut that time down by two days. The operational efficiencies enabled by Slack reduced the waiting time, allowing the team to deliver completed claims more quickly.
Sammons also found that Slack could streamline its hiring and onboarding process. Thanks to automated workflows and seamless communication, Sammons decreased its onboarding time by 35% — a total of four weeks. This improvement enabled new hires to ramp up more efficiently, not only saving the company time and money but creating a higher quality of fast, dependable customer service.
Quick, easy Slack implementation keeps Sammons teams in lockstep
Walling said Slack’s user-friendliness can’t be overstated. Sammons was able to get up and running in just weeks, which included transferring knowledge to its engineers.
“The Slack Professional Services team has been able to deliver at a really nice pace and degree,” Walling noted, calling the expedited timeline and smooth delivery “unbelievable.”
“We were able to launch in six weeks: getting users provisioned, channels created, and automations launched. Compared to other technologies we could have implemented, Slack proved to be extremely cost-effective,” he said.
Even the company’s Risk Committee was thrilled to adopt Slack, primarily because of its adherence to high-level data security standards.
When we asked Walling if he had any advice for enterprises thinking about Slack, his answer was definitive: “Do it!”