Loading

Ami Shah Empathy, passion and a knack for social connections are what drive Ami Shah as she helps her clients reimagine employee benefits.

By Dan Cook // Photography by Gene Smirnov

As a college freshman at Temple University, Ami Shah aspired to be the first Indian Oprah Winfrey. Her initial intent was to major in journalism. But life intervened. “I started a family,” she says.

Suddenly, she needed a good job, and sooner, rather than chasing a dream later. A professor recruited her to his specialty: risk management and insurance. And while the entertainment world may have lost a budding star, the benefits world got one.

Shah now delights and informs her clients and peers as vice president, national accounts, for Corporate Synergies in Camden, New Jersey. With her high energy, can-do (what the client needs) approach to benefits consulting, she has built a career on reimagining employee benefits for clients across the U.S.

The team at Corporate Synergies clearly recognizes the value she has brought to the company as well as to her clients.

“Ami’s dedication and precision make the teams around her better,” says Andrew Bloom, president and CEO at Corporate Synergies. “She delivers and demands exemplary services and empowers her colleagues to do the same. She is invested in the development of her team and gives them the tools to learn and succeed.”

Born in Mumbai, India, she emigrated to the U.S.--and Philadelphia–at age 5. Despite leaving India at such a young age, she says the culture continues to inform her work and life.

The caste to which her family belonged in India is characterized by a dedication to business. She grew up surrounded by industrious parents and relatives, so the switch from media to risk management in college was not especially difficult. In addition, Shah is a people person, and her social nature found ample room for expression as she built her book of clients.

“At the end of the day my job is customer service,” she says. “If all we’re doing is telling them once a year, ‘Here's your renewal, here’s the increase over last year, see you next year,’ you don't get the chance to be that trusted business partner that I want to be for my clients.

“My elevator pitch is, ’I want to be a business partner with an organization to help manage their employee benefits to keep costs down and employees happy.’ I am passionate about truly being an advocate for my clients, about showing empathy for their plan members.”

Necessity is the mother of invention

Business was good and getting better when she got a call from one of her clients, a large regional bank, in January of 2020. The gist of the call shocked her: The client wanted to talk to her about preparing their system for COVID-19.

“My client says, ‘How are your other clients managing and working through COVID?’ She starts talking to me about it. Because of the trust we had as partners, we were able to create a road map for COVID well ahead of most other companies.”

That first phone call led them down a path that led to various COVID-driven innovations that served that client and other Corporate Synergies clients well during the following two years.

“It forced us all to look at things in a different way. It required that I find resources that had the ability to flip the switch. We identified a partner resource to administer COVID protocols at all of the client’s locations.”

That breakthrough delivery was a game-changer. At the time, that partner was offering an app that linked primary care advice lines to plan members and was considering entering the COVID-monitoring market.

“They had the infrastructure and clinical element. They were focused on chronic disease management, such as diabetes. They were able to move from diabetes to monitoring COVID. You know, they say necessity is the mother of invention. It certainly was in this case. Through working with us and our client, they refined their platform to better serve their entire population.”

That’s the kind of service in which Shah takes great pride.

“I want my clients to know I’m here for them, I don’t care what the time is. If they need something, they know they can call me.”

Creating alignment

But COVID was hard on Shah in another way. Her outgoing, empathetic nature thrives on in-person meetings, lunches and dinners where clients can relax and the conversation flows. Suddenly, all that was off the table.

“I worked hard with my clients to overcome that,” she says. “We built good communications systems so that the benefits plans wouldn’t suffer from the lack of the personal touch.”

That determination to keep communication lines open served her well with another client that contacted her as COVID was rearing its ugly head.

“We met them in January 2020. They came to us through a search. They wanted to work with a large organization with lots of resources but one that had a concierge touch. They wanted all the bells and whistles—but they wanted to feel like they were our only client. It felt pretty good to win that one!”

This brand-name New York organization was a “clean slate” client: There was no three-year benefits strategy in place, no benefits roadmap to guide the company forward. Shah liked that.

“They were starting fresh–and the world had just shut down. What a challenge!” she says.

With the clean slate, Shah, her service team and client representatives wrote “a formal benefits philosophy, and then compared that to what they had in place,” she says.

Why is that an important part of Shah’s work?

“If your philosophy says you want to be family friendly, then your benefits program needs to align with that principle,” she says.

The leadership team was involved from the start, developing the philosophy and comparing it to what existed, finding ways to create the alignment.

“That’s the consulting part of our work,” she explains. “Then we moved to the broker part.”

The company had long relationships on the insurance side, relationships that were important to them. “But all their partner relationships were not at their healthiest. They weren’t hearing each other. We became therapists who brought the partners into alignment.”

And next? “There was fat built into the contracts,” she says. “We helped them remove the fat without leaving the partners behind. And the entire incredible relationship that evolved through this consultant/broker process was all built virtually in the pandemic!”

These are the relationships that keep Shah energized and constantly searching for new ways to serve her clients the way they want to be served.

“You have to listen and find out what they want. Bells and whistles are fine. But if you bring them something they don’t want, you have to hear that.”

When she’s not advising her clients, Shah leads an equally active family and community life. Now a proud grandma, she strives to balance work with family needs and activities. Her mother recently moved in with her (“it’s what we do in India”), and increasingly she is seen as the one in her community who will drive the neighbor to appointments, watch her grandson when needed, and keep all her relatives in the area connected.

“And I even took up golf!” she says, laughing. “I guess I should have done that at the start of my career–but I never had the time then.”

Does she regret not pursuing her Oprah Winfrey dream? Nah. Life for Ami Shah couldn’t have turned out better. “Living the dream!” she says.