Sammons Financial Group to offer instant phone support with Agentforce Voice.

For over a century, Sammons Financial Group (SFG) has provided industry-leading financial and retirement products. Today, they manage $135 billion in assets for their clients across the US.

Long hold times stood between SFG customers and the empathetic service they needed.

For generations, SFG has guided individuals and families through retirement planning, legacy building, and life’s unexpected twists. Serving a diverse customer base, SFG supports people at every stage of life — whether they’re planning for retirement with an annuity or finding stability after the loss of a loved one with a life insurance policy. As an employee-owned company, they’re not driven by the pressures of short-term, quarter-by-quarter earnings. This allows them to prioritize long-term planning to best manage their strength and stability. "Because we’re employee-owned, there's a greater stake in what we do for our customers,” said Jackie Cockrum, SFG’s Vice President, Shared Services. “We want to be there for our customers. It’s our culture, our purpose.”

To provide high-touch, personalized service for each customer, SFG funnels all customer questions through a single, dedicated phone line to its knowledgeable reps. But with 2 million calls a year — 30% of which were for basic inquiries like policy values, benefit amounts, or address updates — wait times began impacting the customer experience. Calls were handled in order, meaning a beneficiary collecting on a life insurance policy waited just as long as someone checking their annuity balance. This created long hold times for customers and slowed service reps, whose expertise was better suited for handling complex cases. 

On top of that, SFG’s patchwork of disconnected systems made it difficult to understand customers, slowed operations, and complicated even simple tasks. Reps had to manually piece together information from policy databases, transaction histories, payment processing platforms, customer correspondence records, underwriting systems, and compliance logs just to get a full picture of each customer’s account.

“We had a service representative touching 16 systems in one transaction, swivel-chairing between systems while the customer had to wait,” said Aaron Witt, SFG’s Chief Digital and Data Officer. “We needed to simplify.”

To meet their growth goals, SFG knew they needed a solution to help them move faster without increasing costs. “We're on a mission to double the value of our company in five short years,” said Kevin Waetke, Associate Vice President of Corporate Marketing. “To meet that ambitious vision, we need to provide incredible customer experiences that connect them to answers more quickly.”

With Agentforce, SFG’s customers will get immediate, personalized service by phone.

SFG is adopting Agentforce, the agentic layer of the Salesforce Platform, to get customers the answers they need — fast. When customers call, they'll immediately be connected with Agentforce Voice, which can understand the customer’s natural-language requests and respond to them with natural, spoken language by phone. To answer customer questions, Agentforce securely pulls real-time data like policy values and payment statuses, along with info from knowledge base articles in Financial Services Cloud (FSC), to give callers quick, accurate answers grounded in the right context.

Driving this transformation with Agentforce was made possible by a major milestone in 2023, when SFG unified all its disparate systems into FSC. The move streamlined operations and created a single, reliable source for everything from customer details to policy contracts. Most importantly, it gave human service reps a complete, real-time view of each customer across all divisions. With faster access to accurate information, they could deliver more personalized service and resolve inquiries more efficiently. 

“Unifying our data on the Salesforce Platform gave our employees a home base,” said Witt. “They can now deliver more personalized service in a lot less time.”

Now, SFG’s AI agents will take action on that same single source of truth. When customers ask about an annuity contract’s value or their next payment date, Agentforce retrieves and delivers that information instantly — just as a human rep would. The Salesforce Platform’s built-in safeguards, powered by the Einstein Trust Layer, ensure strict data privacy controls — including sharing rules, permissions, masked data, and zero retention. This helps SFG maintain compliance and protect sensitive customer information while delivering seamless service across humans and AI agents.

SFG will route simple inquiries — comprising 30% of total inquiries — through Agentforce, but for anything more complex, human service reps will take the lead.

“Agentforce is not just a robot that goes out there and talks to customers,” said Cockrum. “By delegating simple tasks to an agent, Agentforce will help us elevate the services our employees are able to provide by freeing them up to empathetically answer more nuanced questions.”

Agentforce will also make it easier for customers to update their account information. Previously, something as simple as changing a beneficiary required calling customer service, waiting on hold, explaining the request, and then waiting for a form to arrive by mail. Now, Agentforce streamlines the process into one intelligent, immediate interaction that still feels natural and empathetic. For example, if a customer calls to update their beneficiaries, Agentforce will verify the caller’s identity, ask them how it can help, identify the correct documentation, and trigger workflows within FSC to send the forms automatically by mail — saving time for both customers and service reps.

SFG expects Agentforce to resolve 20% of inquiries autonomously, lightening workloads for service reps, reducing wait times, and lowering the cost to resolve routine inquiries by an estimated 50%. But beyond efficiency, it makes customer service more flexible and convenient. 

“Today, we’re limited to the hours of operation where we staff the phone line,” said Witt. “Agentforce turns on 24/7 service so we can say, ‘Hey, you want to call at 3:00 a.m. because you're busy and you work an abnormal schedule? Great. We have somebody ready to answer questions for you.’”

Agentforce will fuel growth with faster, more proactive service for distribution partners.

In addition to creating better customer experiences, lowering wait times will also benefit SFG’s distribution partners — the independent agents and financial advisors who sell their policies. 

Since SFG doesn’t sell directly to consumers, these partners are critical to their growth. To sell policies efficiently and effectively, distribution partners need quick access to information such as policy details, commission structures, application statuses, and client-specific data. They also may need assistance with troubleshooting claims, resolving underwriting issues, or addressing customer inquiries about complex financial products. By reducing call volume and increasing self-service options, Agentforce frees up service reps to assist distribution partners faster, enabling them to access real-time information and resolve issues more efficiently.

Looking ahead, SFG sees Agentforce as a critical tool to help them shift from reactive service to proactive engagement. Agentforce will help promote new products, reengage inactive sellers, recommend cross-selling opportunities based on FSC data, and help partners learn about SFG’s offerings faster.

“We’ve been around for almost a hundred years,” said Witt. “Our oldest life insurance policy was issued in 1938, and we’re still caring for that policy today. We need to modernize in service of both our distribution partners and that person whose policy was issued in 1938.”

The deeply unified Salesforce Platform is driving measurable success for SFG — faster than ever. With FSC bringing all their data into one place, SFG can launch Agentforce quickly, iterate even faster, and scale effortlessly. “By simplifying everything on one platform, we’ve created a natural foundation for generative AI,” said Witt.

Agentforce’s low-code tools make building, testing, and deploying AI-powered agents so straightforward that SFG expects to launch its phone agent in just six weeks once voice capabilities are available. “The biggest surprise is how little of a lift there is,” Witt said. “If Prompt Builder looks simple, that’s because it is.”

With digital labor, SFG can provide personalized, 24/7 service without expanding its support team or staffing around the clock. Whether customers are celebrating a new beginning or facing a difficult transition, Agentforce ensures SFG is always there with fast, reliable answers and high-quality support.