In insurance, the only certainty is uncertainty — and nowhere is that volatility felt more than in the contact center. One calm day can turn into crisis the next: a hurricane, a system outage, or a viral campaign can flood every queue within hours.
For many insurers, even the best workforce plans collapse under this kind of pressure. The question isn’t if disruption will strike — it’s when, and how ready your contact center will be when it does.
Let’s explore how modern contact center planning helps insurers build resilience, predict demand, and deliver the service speed, accuracy, and empathy customers expect.
Why insurers can’t afford delayed decisions
Rising costs, shrinking margins, and the surge in customer expectations have pushed insurers to an inflection point. Some carriers are even restructuring in high-risk areas across the United States, leaving contact centers to manage the fallout. These market exits often require urgent changes in workforce training, operational workflows, and regulatory compliance to handle the disruption. Insurers that fail to modernize their planning processes to manage the challenges above risk eroding both profitability and trust.
According to Deloitte, several industry trends underscore why insurers must rethink how they plan, staff, and manage their service operations:
| Industry trends | Impact on contact centers |
|---|---|
|
Property and casualty margins are tightening as combined ratios are projected to approach 99%. |
Heightened pressure to eliminate operational inefficiencies and control costs. |
|
The global protection gap is widening at US$183 billion in uninsured catastrophe losses. |
Surge in call volumes and increased claim complexity, requiring smarter staffing. |
|
Customer trust is eroding, with some carriers seeing trust levels as low as 33%. |
Poor service experiences become a primary driver of customer churn and brand damage. |
|
AI adoption is lagging, as 90% of executives see the urgency to implement but only 25% have acted. |
A massive readiness gap leaves call centers unprepared for the shift to human-AI models. |
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Products complexity is rising, highlighted by a 12% growth in fixed-annuity sales. |
Growing demand for high-touch, advisory interactions instead of simple call handling. |
As costs climb and customers demand faster, smarter support, modernizing planning is no longer optional — it’s a strategic imperative to protect your margins and loyalty.
Every delayed staffing decision carries a cost. Lost customers, burnt-out agents, and eroding trust are all a direct result of inadequate staffing. Too many carriers still rely on manual spreadsheets and disconnected systems that can’t adapt to real-time changes. The consequence is long handling times, stressed agents, and missed opportunities to act with agility and compassion.
The high cost of manual, disconnected planning
Disconnected, manual planning doesn’t just slow insurers down, it actively undermines resilience.
- Organizational paralysis: When storms or outages hit, claims queues surge while other teams sit idle. Skilled resources exist — but aren’t deployed where they’re needed most.
- The spreadsheet trap: Static spreadsheets can’t keep up with new regulations, surging call volumes, or workforce disruptions. Plans become obsolete the moment conditions change.
- Reactive/over-hiring: With every crisis, companies scramble to overstaff. This cycle burns budgets, morale, and institutional knowledge.
Every outdated process adds friction, cost, and risk — until one disruption exposes just how fragile the system really is.
To stay competitive, insurers must close these operational gaps and move from reactive chaos to proactive control.
According to McKinsey, insurers are shifting from predictive models to agentic AI systems capable of multistep reasoning and real-time decision support. These tools analyze claims, policy data, and customer context to guide agents through complex interactions and automate routine tasks. But without accurate, connected planning, even the smartest AI can’t deliver its full value. To unlock AI efficiency without sacrificing human empathy, insurers must align workforce models, budgets, and training around dynamic, data-driven plans.
In today’s contact centers, planning isn’t a back-office exercise. It’s a frontline differentiator.
Shifting from reactive to proactive control with Anaplan
Modern contact centers can’t afford to guess. They need the ability to see around corners — to plan, pivot, and perform with precision.
That’s where Anaplan comes in.
Anaplan doesn’t replace workforce management systems — it amplifies them. While those tools handle daily scheduling, Anaplan provides the strategic and operational planning layer that connects finance, HR, and operations, giving you the power to model every “what-if” before it happens.
With Anaplan for Workforce Planning, you can:
- Model the impact of benefit changes, new products, or marketing campaigns
- Align staffing capacity with demand forecasts months or quarters ahead
- Balance cost, service, and staffing goals before you execute a single plan
- Unify HR, finance, and operations to ensure budgeting, hiring or outsourcing, and training are always in sync
Instead of guessing, you can now operate with a clear, strategic vision. Anaplan transforms high-level business drivers and goals into actionable plans by enabling you to:
- Master capacity planning by dynamically modeling agent supply, and use of AI and productivity tools, against customer demand
- Forecast with intelligence by linking plans to business drivers and external factors
- Optimize budgets by instantly seeing the financial impact of every staffing decision
- Connect strategy to operations with cross-functional reporting that ensures every action supports your core objectives
This is the connective tissue between finance, workforce, and service delivery that turns fragmented planning into proactive control.
Real-world results of smarter contact center staffing
When planning is connected and intelligent, the results ripple across the enterprise — from reduced costs and faster response times to higher customer satisfaction.
The shift to connected, continuous planning is already driving measurable impact:
- RSA Insurance Group linked finance and workforce plans in Anaplan, boosting productivity by 50% and improving forecast accuracy
- A global underwriting leader transformed contact center planning from a basic headcount exercise into a strategic capability — linking staffing decisions directly to financial outcomes and service performance
Stay ahead of the next spike
Disruption is certain. The difference is how your business responds to it. Will your contact center scramble, or respond with confidence? At Anaplan, we understand that insurance contact centers sit at the intersection of customer experience and operational resilience — and stronger control for your contact center starts with better workforce planning.
