Fred Loya Insurance drives costs down and dependability up with 8x8

Founder Fred Loya was a star agent for a major insurer when he saw that minorities and low-income customers were paying unfair premiums. He left to start his own insurance company that focuses on underserved communities. It is now one of the largest Latino-owned companies in the country, with 726 agencies in eleven states.

The Challenge: Dead-end technology with a high price tag

Fred Loya Insurance had hit a wall with their current phone system. It had difficulties keeping up with compliance and new privacy laws without costly changes from the vendor.

“It was a long process just to add an advisory that this call may be recorded,” recalls Mobashir Ahmed, IT Manager for Loya Insurance. After the privacy announcement was added for the six contact centers, then the sales offices needed the same modification, with another big bill.

Founder Fred Loya was a star agent for a major insurer when he saw that minorities and low-income customers were paying unfair premiums. He left to start his own insurance company that focuses on underserved communities. It is now one of the largest Latino-owned companies in the country, with 726 agencies in eleven states.

The Challenge: Dead-end technology with a high price tag

Fred Loya Insurance had hit a wall with their current phone system. It had difficulties keeping up with compliance and new privacy laws without costly changes from the vendor.

“It was a long process just to add an advisory that this call may be recorded,” recalls Mobashir Ahmed, IT Manager for Loya Insurance. After the privacy announcement was added for the six contact centers, then the sales offices needed the same modification, with another big bill.

Founder Fred Loya was a star agent for a major insurer when he saw that minorities and low-income customers were paying unfair premiums. He left to start his own insurance company that focuses on underserved communities. It is now one of the largest Latino-owned companies in the country, with 726 agencies in eleven states.

The Challenge: Dead-end technology with a high price tag

Fred Loya Insurance had hit a wall with their current phone system. It had difficulties keeping up with compliance and new privacy laws without costly changes from the vendor.

“It was a long process just to add an advisory that this call may be recorded,” recalls Mobashir Ahmed, IT Manager for Loya Insurance. After the privacy announcement was added for the six contact centers, then the sales offices needed the same modification, with another big bill.

Founder Fred Loya was a star agent for a major insurer when he saw that minorities and low-income customers were paying unfair premiums. He left to start his own insurance company that focuses on underserved communities. It is now one of the largest Latino-owned companies in the country, with 726 agencies in eleven states.

The Challenge: Dead-end technology with a high price tag

Fred Loya Insurance had hit a wall with their current phone system. It had difficulties keeping up with compliance and new privacy laws without costly changes from the vendor.

“It was a long process just to add an advisory that this call may be recorded,” recalls Mobashir Ahmed, IT Manager for Loya Insurance. After the privacy announcement was added for the six contact centers, then the sales offices needed the same modification, with another big bill.

Fred Loya Insurance’s costs went down and reliability went up immediately when it unified customer engagement, voice, video meetings and chat onto the 8x8 eXperience Communications Platform.

Each change from Cisco also caused more work for the IT team. “Every update was a living nightmare for us, because we feared it might fix one thing and break two others. But we had no choice,” says Mr. Ahmed. Whenever one part of the legacy system went down, it would take the company’s whole phone network with it. “We’re talking about 400 calls dropped – which meant hanging up on that many customers.”

“We had to draw a line and ask ourselves, how long are we going to keep doing this instead of looking for a new phone system?”

Loya Insurance needed its communications to be worry-free and easy to administer, without the overhead of maintaining outdated systems.

The Solution: 8x8 eXperience Communications Platform

Of the ten vendors Mr. Ahmed’s team evaluated, only 8x8 offered a single platform for contact center and unified communications with 99.999% uptime. Loya Insurance could unify customer engagement, voice, video meetings and chat onto one dependable cloud platform.

8x8 offered Loya Insurance a proof-of-concept implementation for three months, no strings attached. Helpful engineers at 8x8 were available to answer any questions, without sales pressure.

“There was just this sense of comfort that we got from working with 8x8,” Mr. Ahmed says. “And of course, the product itself is wonderful.”

The Results: No more high costs, no more nightmares

“Our costs went down significantly, right away, just by porting our lines over to 8x8,” says Mr. Ahmed. 8x8’s centralized administration meant that Loya Insurance could save on staffing by reducing its five phone admins to three. Most importantly, changes happen without the delay or the staggeringly high tab.

“We got a request from management to make a change in the way we were handling calls in the contact center,” recalls Mr. Ahmed. “We were able to implement that change within 30 minutes on a live system without interrupting a single call.”

8x8 Speech Analytics and Quality Management help Loya Insurance comply with regulations around what agents are legally allowed to say. Managers can swiftly coach agents when slip-ups occur. And with customer sentiment insights from 8x8 Speech Analytics, Loya Insurance can spot problems and trends.

Downtime is a thing of the past. “I realized we had gone an entire year with no outages, no calls being lost, none of the problems we had with the old system,” Mr. Ahmed says.

Since moving to 8x8, Loya Insurance is getting the cost savings and ease of administration they expected. “Try 8x8,” Mr. Ahmed advises. “It will benefit your company, your team, and your bottom line.”