MaxoTel for Insurance Brokers: Setting Up a Phone System That Produces Usable Data

Broker relationships in Australia run long. According to the 2026 Vero SME Insurance Index, 80 per cent of businesses used a broker in the past year, and 42 per cent have used the same broker for more than three years. Client satisfaction with brokers sat at 69 per cent across both SMEs and large businesses. The Index surveyed more than 1,500 Australian businesses across micro, small, medium, large and very large segments.

Those are relationships measured in years, and a good deal of the contact that sustains them runs through the phone. A renewal conversation, a mid-term adjustment, a first notification of a claim, a new enquiry from a referral: each of these can arrive as a call, get handled by whoever is available, and end. What remains afterwards depends on what the phone system was configured to keep.

For a brokerage running on a hosted PBX, that configuration is not a one-off IT task. It shapes what management will be able to see later. Call volume by month, how quickly calls were answered, which numbers generate the most inbound activity, whether a particular conversation can be retrieved twelve months on: all of it is downstream of choices made in the account portal, often during setup, often without anyone weighing the reporting consequences at the time.

MaxoTel names brokerage as one of the segments it builds for, and its own brokerage page covers mortgage, insurance and stock broking. The system is capable. The question worth spending time on is which of its settings produce usable data and which quietly close the door on it.

A hosted PBX produces two kinds of record, and they are not the same thing.

The first is the call detail record. Inbound and outbound calls on the service appear in Call History whether or not recording is switched on. MaxoTel exposes these through the Call History API, which returns records in JSON or CSV for a nominated time period. Each record carries a unique call ID, the date and time, the direction, the originating and terminating numbers, the call duration in seconds, the completion status, the cost, and a flag indicating whether a recording exists for that call. Access requires an API key with Call History read permission, generated from the account portal.

That is a precise, structured, machine-readable log of call activity. It is also a log built around numbers. The documented fields identify the party at each end of the call, and none of them names the staff member who took it. The API documents the destination field as the terminating party number, while the portal's call history view additionally shows the type of destination for inbound calls. Exactly what appears there for a given queue or ring group is worth checking against your own configuration rather than assuming, because the documentation does not specify it. For a brokerage, the practical consequence is that the export answers questions about lines and volumes well, and questions about individual brokers only as far as the routing structure allows.

The completion status field is worth understanding early, because it carries a caveat that matters for anyone measuring answer rates. The portal filters calls by answered, meaning connected, or unanswered. MaxoTel notes that where an IVR is in use, a call is marked connected as soon as the IVR picks up. A brokerage whose main number opens with a menu will therefore see a high connected rate that reflects the menu answering rather than a person. That is not a fault in the reporting, but it does mean the raw connected figure needs reading alongside how the front of the call flow is built.

Queue performance sits in a different place again. MaxoTel's queue statistics report on wait times, staff and abandoned calls, which is where a brokerage would look to see how quickly calls are being answered and which times of day carry the heaviest load.

The second kind of record is the recording. MaxoTel's call recording applies to inbound calls, outbound calls, or both, subject to the global configuration and any per-extension exclusions, and a recording is retrievable against its entry in Call History. That gives you the conversation itself.

The two records meet at exactly one point. The call detail record carries a flag showing whether a recording exists for that call, which is enough to tell you that audio is available and nothing at all about what is in it. Finding the recording is a lookup. Knowing what was said in it is a different job.

The gap between the two is worth being precise about, because it shapes everything that follows. The call detail record tells you that a conversation happened, for how long, and between which numbers. The recording holds what was actually said, as audio. Reviewing that audio manually means working through it one call at a time, which is why a week of renewal conversations is easy to store and hard to summarise.

Consent and retention obligations sit alongside these settings and are a separate question from how the system is configured. We have covered call recording compliance in Australia separately.

Illustrative. The four call types represent a common brokerage pattern rather than measured data, and the routing recommendations follow from documented MaxoTel behaviour rather than a specific implementation.

A well-configured MaxoTel system answers the operational questions. How many calls came in and how long they ran comes from the call history export. How fast they were answered and when the peaks fall comes from the queue statistics. Which conversations have audio attached is flagged in the record.

The questions it is not built to answer are the ones about content. Which renewal conversations raised a coverage concern that nobody logged. Whether a disclosure was actually made on the call, and on how many calls. How a newer team member handles a client who opens by saying the premium has gone up again. Those answers sit in the recordings, and getting at them by hand means listening to individual calls one after another.

Callyx.ai automatically monitors 100% of your recorded calls. It transcribes and analyses recorded conversations, turning audio that can only be reviewed one call at a time into something a principal can look at across a whole week of client contact. The call detail record says a 14-minute call happened on Tuesday. Transcription and analysis of that recording is what turns it into a conversation you can read.

The 2026 Vero SME Insurance Index gives some useful context on how clients feel about this. It found 55 per cent of businesses comfortable with their broker using AI to support insurance-related processes, with comfort higher for administrative tasks such as reporting a claim, and lower, at 40 per cent, for AI supporting a claim outcome decision. Reading those figures together, the pattern suggests clients draw a line between AI assisting the work and AI making the call. Analysis of conversations that have already happened sits on the assisting side of that line, though the Index measured comfort with insurance processes generally rather than with call analysis specifically.

Pulling that first export also establishes it as a repeatable task, which is what any later reporting or post-call automation work will build on.

A hosted PBX is the operating surface for a good deal of what a brokerage does, and its configuration is a reporting decision as much as a telephony one. MaxoTel gives a brokerage real control over routing, recording and retention, and it exposes call history through an API in a format that can be analysed. Separating call types onto their own numbers, choosing queues and ring groups for what each one measures, setting retention against a genuine requirement and enabling backup will give a brokerage a structured record of call activity that holds its value over time.

That record describes the shape of the conversations. What was said inside them stays in the audio, which is where Callyx.ai works: transcribing and analysing recorded calls, and turning a library of individual files into something a principal can act on across a whole week of client contact.