Mutual of Omaha Uses Agents to Turn Silence Into Sales

The Takeaway

Invoca’s AI Messaging Agent now engages after-hours inquiries via SMS, qualifies the need, schedules a confirmed callback, and hands off to a licensed agent when the conversation requires human touch.

Mission

Mutual of Omaha’s mission is to help its customers protect what they care about and achieve their financial goals. Its vision is that every customer has a financial future that is imagined, planned, and secured.

Challenge

Life insurance shopping doesn't happen on a schedule. People research plans, compare rates, and decide they're ready to talk to someone in the evenings and on weekends, exactly when Mutual of Omaha's sales team wasn't available to answer. Every one of those after-hours moments of interest was a lead that had to wait until the next business day, and by then, some of that intent had already cooled off.

Leadership had a hunch that this after-hours window was worth more than the team assumed, but there was no way to prove it or act on it without adding staff around the clock.

Solution

Mutual of Omaha deployed Invoca's AI Messaging Agent, triggered by inbound text messages, to keep the conversation moving whenever a prospect or customer reached out outside business hours. The agent was built to:

• Greet the lead and ask what brought them in, then handle enrollment, billing, claims, and policy questions
• Recognize the moment a licensed agent is needed and hand off 
• Collect a name and preferred day and time for a callback, and confirm the caller's timezone and business hours
• Clarify vague or partial replies with follow-up questions
• Carry every after-hours conversation to a booked appointment and send a priority callback number ahead of time

Insights

The results changed how leadership thought about the after-hours window. "Our senior executives were extremely impressed," said Tim Mogler, Sr. Segment Marketer from Mutual of Omaha. "They said, 'Yes! This is what we want.'"

What stood out wasn't just that leads were engaged, but also how many of them turned into real business. "We saw such good results with after-hours SMS, close to 30% of people opted in. This is an untapped market," Mogler said.

The agent also proved it could handle more than one kind of conversation. New coverage and enrollment questions, policy service issues like billing and claims, and general admin questions all came through the same channel, and the agent routed each one appropriately.

Results

• 34% of opt-ins engaged the agent in a real conversation over the 16-week trial
• 73% of engaged callers were carried all the way to a scheduled, timezone-confirmed callback
• 28 completed callback calls against 27 scheduled appointments
• 27% final conversion rate on after-hours callbacks, roughly a third of the life insurance leads that engaged turned into sales

"Our results were crazy good," Mogler said. "We saved about a third of the leads and turned them into sales. After-hours SMS coverage turned out to be a real gold mine."

What matters most: a channel that used to go dark every night and weekend is now where a third of the sales conversation happens. Based on those results, Mutual of Omaha is expanding agent coverage to additional campaigns.

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