Where the Phone Time Goes
in a Brokerage

The call itself is the part of a broker's day that leaves a record. Every hosted phone system logs that a call happened, how long it ran and which numbers were on it. The two parts sitting either side of that record, the waiting before a call connects and the work that follows once it ends, are just as real and considerably harder to see. The scale of the second one is well documented at industry level. Boston Consulting Group's April 2025 analysis of AI in insurance found that administrative tasks consume more than 50% of an agent's or a broker's time, limiting the opportunity available for client engagement and business development. That figure covers agent and broker-driven channels across the industry rather than call-related admin specifically, so it describes the size of the category rather than the size of the phone tail inside it. It is still the most useful starting number available, because it says the administrative layer is not a rounding error against client work. It is comparable in size to it.

Inside a brokerage, a meaningful share of that layer is generated by the phone. A renewal call produces a file note, a policy comparison, an email to the client and often a task for somebody else. A claim notification produces a lodgement, an insurer contact and a diary entry. The call is the visible event. The work is the tail. This matters commercially because capacity in a brokerage is usually estimated from the visible event. A principal deciding whether the team can absorb renewal season, or whether the next hire is due, is often working from call volume and a general sense of how busy everyone is. That estimate holds only if the ratio between a call and the work it creates is stable, and there is rarely a number available to confirm that it is. The six call metrics a brokerage can read from its own phone system describe the shape of call activity well. This article takes one of them, after-call work, and treats it as the number that sets the ceiling. It is the only one of the six that a phone system cannot produce on its own, and it is also the one that moves first when volume rises, because the work a call creates does not compress the way a conversation sometimes can.

Three parts, three different places, and only two of them exist without a decision being made first. Call time sits in the per-call record. MaxoTel's call history holds every inbound and outbound call with its type, time, origin, destination, status, rate, duration and cost, filterable by answered or unanswered and downloadable as a CSV file. Duration there means the amount of time the call was in progress. That is not the same as time in conversation: it runs from connection to hang-up and the export does not split it further, so it is an upper bound on talk rather than a measure of it. For a month of activity across a small team, it is still the closest thing to a complete record of call time a brokerage already owns.

Wait time sits in the queue layer, which is a separate report. MaxoTel's queue statistics report on wait times, staff activity and abandoned calls, and are built to show how quickly calls are being answered and which times of day and days of the week are busiest, so staffing can be adjusted against real demand. That last point is the operational one: the queue layer is a rostering instrument, and it answers a different question from the per-call export.

After-call work sits nowhere the phone system can reach. The call has ended, so the phone system has stopped counting. The CRM holds the outcome of the work, the file note and the updated policy status. Unless it has been configured to capture start and finish times against each task, it records that the work was done rather than how long it took, and that configuration is worth checking before assuming the number does not already exist. The minutes between hanging up and being genuinely ready for the next conversation are the part of the day with no system of record at all. Named task by task, that third part is more substantial than it usually gets credit for. A typical client call generates a written file note of what was discussed and agreed, a CRM update covering policy status, cover changes and renewal dates, a confirming email to the client, a request out to an insurer or to the client for a document, a diary entry for the next contact, and in many cases a task handed to somebody else in the office. Advice conversations add a record of what was recommended and why. Claim notifications add a lodgement and an insurer reference. Which of these a given call requires depends on the firm's own process and on what was discussed, but few are discretionary once that process is set, and none of them is visible on a call report. They are the reason a day of eight calls is not a day of eight call durations. Their length also varies with the conversation that produced them, which is why an average taken across call types tends to be less useful than a figure read per type. What any of these layers hold six months from now also depends partly on how the phone system was set up in the first place, which is worth checking before any of these numbers are used to support a decision about headcount.

None of the difficulty here is about effort. It is about what the available instruments were built to count, and the gaps are consistent enough across firms to be worth naming.

A usable picture of the split takes about a month and does not require new software. The approach below treats the two recorded parts as data and the third as a sample.

Illustrative example: converting the split into hours. Every figure below is an assumption, not measured data. It is included to show the arithmetic, not to suggest these are typical numbers for any firm. Assume one broker handling eight client calls a day. Assume an average call duration of nine minutes, giving 72 minutes of call time a day. Assume six minutes of after-call work per call, giving 48 minutes a day. Assume 20 working days in the month and no seasonal variation. On those assumptions the broker spends 24 hours a month on calls and 16 hours a month on the work those calls create. The full cycle is 40 hours, and 40% of it happens after the call has ended. Across a team of eight brokers on the same assumptions, after-call work accounts for about 128 hours a month, or roughly three and a half full-time weeks at 38 hours a week. The second piece of arithmetic is the one that decides what gets automated first. Assume that documentation, meaning the file note and the structured record of what was said and agreed, accounts for about half of those six minutes. Producing that portion automatically would return roughly 8 hours a month per broker, or about 64 hours a month across the team, without anyone changing how they take a call. The other half, the judgement work of deciding what to do next and doing it, stays where it is. Both calculations move substantially if the assumptions move. That is the argument for measuring the split rather than estimating it: the same structure run on a firm's own numbers produces a figure a principal can plan against.

Callyx.ai works on the calls a firm already records. Brokers take calls the way they already do, and the summary and the action items are produced without anyone sitting down to write them.

The platform automatically monitors 100% of your recorded calls rather than a sample of them, which is the part of this that stops scaling when it is done by hand.

Results are delivered after every call to an inbox, a CRM or a practice management system, depending on how the firm is set up. Core is included in every plan. Comply, Coach, Insights and Learn are Professional plan modules, so the mix available to a given firm depends on the plan it is on. Callyx.ai is Australian-owned and runs on Australian data infrastructure. The practical change is what the split looks like afterwards. Call time stays where it is, because conversations take the time they take. Wait time is a rostering question and stays a rostering question. The documentation portion of the third part stops being time a broker spends and becomes output a system produces, which is the only one of the three that behaves that way.

None of these five steps requires a new system. They require a month of data a firm already owns, a fortnight of attention, and a decision about what the resulting number is for. Those three criteria, frequency, predictability and independence from professional judgement, are the same ones that apply to any process automation decision in a brokerage, and the after-call tail is worth testing against all three.

Phone time in a brokerage divides into three parts. Call time is recorded by the phone system, as a single duration figure. Wait time is recorded by the queue layer. The work that follows a call is recorded only by its outputs, and the minutes it takes are the part that sets what a broker can actually carry in a day. Measuring the split is a month of work using data a firm already holds, plus a short, clearly bounded sample for the part no system counts. The result is a capacity figure rather than a performance figure, which makes it useful for rostering, for renewal season planning, and for deciding whether the next hire is genuinely the next thing to do. Once the split carries a number, the automation question becomes answerable rather than arguable. The documentation portion of after-call work is the part least dependent on professional judgement, and where a firm's own sample shows it is also a substantial share of the tail, it is the strongest candidate. It is the part Callyx.ai produces from the recording rather than asking a broker to write. Call time stays a conversation. The tail becomes output.