A major insurance broker — when white-glove met scale.

A major insurance broker built its name on white-glove service: connecting clients with the best coverage at the best price across more than 250 carriers. That high-touch experience wasn't a feature; it was the brand.

Then the company grew, fast. As the client base expanded, the cracks in the service model began to show. The very thing the company was known for was getting harder to deliver at scale.

They brought us in to diagnose the root causes, recommend process and technology fixes, ship as many quick wins as possible, and, bigger than any single fix, make continuous improvement a permanent discipline inside the Service organization.

Exponential growth was outrunning the service model. A high-touch experience that worked at one scale was breaking at the next, and the cost landed exactly where the company could least afford it: on the client relationship that was its whole reputation.

Worse, the organization couldn't see its own situation clearly. The data that could explain where and why service was failing existed, most of it in Salesforce, but it was effectively inaccessible, so leadership was managing by instinct instead of evidence.

I knew there were issues, but I had no idea they were this bad.— A company executive, on our first findings readout

The problem: the white-glove service that was the company's entire brand couldn't scale with the company's growth, and the data that could prove why was locked away, leaving leadership to manage on instinct.

The instinct in a situation like this is to reach for technology: buy a tool, automate a queue, call it fixed. We didn't start there. We started by understanding the work as it actually happened: discovery interviews with stakeholders across Service and Technology, and direct observation of agents doing their jobs.

From that, our service designer L.P. and I built the diagnostic: SIPOCs, service blueprints, Voice-of-the-Customer and gap analyses, impact-versus-effort matrices, and more than twenty current-state process maps that surfaced still more opportunities for redesign and deeper integration.

Then we made the data speak. The company had an abundance of Service data, most of it trapped in Salesforce. Our data team of T.S., D.G., and D.S. pushed it into Snowflake, giving everyone fast access to numbers and reporting that had been impossible weeks before. We used it to answer business questions with evidence, including validating a recent process change that had cut client case-aging by 46% in certain instances. Two workshops, one with business stakeholders and one with technology, turned the findings into a prioritized plan everyone had a hand in.

The engagement produced a lot of artifacts. Three of them carried the weight.

The decision I'd reverse: we should have gotten into the data far sooner. We explored — qualitatively, thoroughly — for most of the engagement, when we should have closed our exploration earlier and gone deep on surfacing the quantitative answers to the business's human-centered questions. The qualitative work was right; we just let it run too long before letting the numbers do the persuading, and our most convincing findings arrived later than they needed to.

The surprise: how much technical and process debt a company can pile up simply because the money keeps rolling in. With no external pressure forcing better internal decisions, an organization can skip best practices during the good times and scale itself straight into pain. That pain, when the lean times come, can grow bad enough to threaten the whole org. Success hides the rot.

What I carried forward: listen to the client's own people about their own leaders. The company's team warned me that my usual presentation style was anathema to their CEO, and coached me on how to scope and deliver, the modality as much as the decks, to earn his trust fast. I took the advice and won over a tough executive, instead of getting our recommendations dismissed over a personality mismatch. The work is only as valuable as the room's willingness to hear it, the same relationship lesson a global automaker taught me the hard way.