Category: Blog

I believe all performance data should be visible to everyone.

Here’s why:

As data moves up through management layers, it gets distorted.
Each level wants to paint themselves in the best light.

So that by the time it reaches the executive level 
It can look very different from what’s happening on the frontline.

The fix is simple: Transparency.

Frontline agents should see:

• Time on phone
• Call duration
• Quality scores
• Calls answered

Then roll those up to supervisors.
Then to the manager level.
Each layer visible to all.

When you do this:

1. Trust goes up because everyone sees the same numbers.
2. Issues surface early, before they become expensive.
3. Top performers get the recognition they deserve.
4. Healthy competition emerges naturally.

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I’m Mark Danielson, and I help healthcare leaders reduce support costs while improving patient satisfaction.

Follow me for practical insights on cutting contact center costs, improving service quality, and modernizing operations without the tradeoffs.

Labor is 70-80% of your contact center costs.

Yet most executives don’t know how to tell if they’re overstaffed.

Contact center labor breaks into 3 buckets:

1. Direct labor (agents talking to customers)
2. QA team (monitoring calls, feedback, observations)
3. Management layer (supervisors, managers, directors)

Most centers are overstaffed at the top and understaffed at the bottom.

These are the ratios I’ve seen consistently work best:

• 1 supervisor per 15-18 agents
• 1 manager per 6-7 supervisors

Want to audit your structure right now?

– Pull up your org chart
– Calculate your ratios
– Stack them against these benchmarks

You’ll know immediately if you’re overstaffed.

And if you are? You’ve just found your fastest path to savings.

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I’m Mark Danielson, and I help healthcare leaders reduce support costs while improving patient satisfaction.

Follow me for practical insights on cutting contact center costs, improving service quality, and modernizing operations without the tradeoffs.

I’ve seen contact centers push agents to 90% utilization.

Most of the time it’s a mistake.

Because when agents are on back-to-back calls all day
They’ll usually either find their own ways to be off calls, or worse: burnout and quit.

Here’s what I’ve seen work much better:

Schedule agents at 80% phone time.

Allocate the other 20% for:

• Scheduled breaks
• Training sessions
• Team meetings
• Admin tasks

This isn’t “wasted time.”
It’s the buffer that keeps your team from burning out.

And here’s the counterintuitive part:
Lower utilization often means better performance.

Because agents who aren’t exhausted:

→ Handle calls more efficiently
→ Provide better customer experiences
→ Stay with your company longer

So that 20% buffer pays for itself in reduced turnover alone.

Stop optimizing for maximum utilization.
Start optimizing for sustainable performance.

Your agents will thank you. Your customers will feel it. And your bottom line will prove it.

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I’m Mark Danielson, and I help healthcare leaders reduce support costs while improving patient satisfaction.

Follow me for practical insights on cutting contact center costs, improving service quality, and modernizing operations without the tradeoffs.

I’ve found at least 10% waste in every team I’ve audited.

Here are the 3 fastest places to find savings:

1. Agent-level productivity analysis

Go agent by agent. 
You’ll find patterns: longer breaks, inflated wrap-up time, excessive off-phone time.
Modern tools can track what agents do all day and find where time is leaking.

2. Supervisor ratio inconsistencies

Look at the ratios across your teams.
One team might have a 1:7 supervisor-to-agent ratio. Another team has 1:12.
That’s overstaffing you can immediately correct.

3. Manual QA processes

If you’ve already invested in call recording software, you can usually add quality assurance tech.
So you don’t need a full QA team to do what software can do instead.
Automate the process and redeploy the headcount.

These are low-hanging fruit corrections.
You can make them in 30-60 days
And save 10-15% of your labor costs without touching customer experience.

The key is knowing where to look.

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I’m Mark Danielson, and I help healthcare leaders reduce support costs while improving patient satisfaction.

Follow me for practical insights on cutting contact center costs, improving service quality, and modernizing operations without the tradeoffs.

Most executives think they have to choose:

High quality or low cost

After running customer service operations for years, I’ve learned that the cost/quality tradeoff is a myth. 

You can have both. Here’s how:

Give customers a choice in how they contact you.

Because quality isn’t about how much you spend. It’s about matching the experience to the customer.

And everyone is different.

Some want to call and talk to a person.
Some are comfortable chatting with AI.
Some prefer self-service.

When you offer multiple channels, two things happen:

1. Customers self-select into the option that gives them the best experience
2. Your cost per interaction drops because distribution skews lower cost

Same team size. Lower call volume. Better satisfaction scores.

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I’m Mark Danielson, and I help healthcare leaders reduce support costs while improving patient satisfaction.

Follow me for practical insights on cutting contact center costs, improving service quality, and modernizing operations without the tradeoffs.

Healthcare isn’t just about doctors and clinics—it’s about how technology can make the experience smoother for patients. We talked about why putting patients first is the key to better healthcare experiences and why decentralized centralized scheduling works. Now let’s look at the tools that are changing the game in this next installment on “Transforming Patient Experience in Healthcare”.

Refresher: Must-Have Tech (The Basics)

Online Scheduling: The best systems schedule up to 70% of appointments online. It’s like booking a dinner reservation—no phone required.  If this is an area that is new to you there are plenty of other articles that can provide you with an overview

Apps and Websites: All EMR platforms let patients find you and book easily. Bonus points if they don’t need to log in just to check availability. This is a mature business offering with lots of good options regardless of your size.

Interactive Voice Assistants (IVA): This is currently the most exciting area in patient access.  Up until about 8 months ago, we were relegated to robotic, script-based tools of ever increasing frustration for our patients.  Those days are now behind us.  There are currently multiple options that can provide you and your patients with human sounding AI that can talk, understand, and schedule perfectly every time.  This tech is able to answer up to 70% of all scheduling, cancelation and rescheduling requests with development underway for billing, RX refills and many other interactions.  In addition to being easy to understand and conversational, it doesn’t make mistakes, answers 24/7, doesn’t quit, doesn’t take vacation, doesn’t get frustrated with patients, and never calls in sick. Like the other tech, there is an IVA to fit every size of operation.  It also allows you to bring the rest of your scheduling back on shore and into your clinics.  

Smart Fixes

Ever called a helpline and couldn’t understand the agent because they were offshore and your first thought was “this call is going to take forever”? In the last year, an accent neutralization software has launched that smooths out the offshore accent so that it sounds like the speaker has been in the US for years. This allows you to continue with the low cost of offshore but without the frustration that comes with it. Let us know if you’d like to hear it and we can connect you with them for a demonstration.

Why It’s a Win

When you maximize the use of current technology with a good in-clinic scheduling model you can improve your patient satisfaction without adding on-shore costs. Even if this doesn’t sound like something you want to do right away, if you aren’t using accent neutralization software and planning to roll out a new voice IVA solution, you should be doing both because you can take advantage of significant improvements and savings today. In the next article, we’ll reveal the secret weapon for patient support.

Last time, we introduced the decentralized centralized model to put patients first in our series “Transforming Patient Experience in Healthcare“. Today, let’s unpack how it actually works and why it’s such a big deal for healthcare.

Healthcare centralized call centers because schedulers in the clinics were inefficient and sometimes ineffective.  They were often pulled away to help in-office patients or look up records, leaving patients on the phones irritated and listening to hold music.  On the flip side, while clinic staff are engaged in phone scheduling, in-office patient experience suffers.  These conflicting priorities lead to frustration on all sides and a more expensive, yet poor overall experience.  

After the big push for centralized scheduling happened 10 years ago, both patients and doctors have been left concerned with lack of connection.  With a little work, these frustrations can be left in the past.  COVID-19 brought with it a mass transition to work-from-home (WFH) for call center work. Tools and processes were perfected.  In addition, AI voice solutions have matured in the last 8 months to the point where it can accurately handle up to 70% of frontline scheduling calls.  We can take these best practice processes and tools to build a model that retains the cost savings of a central, US-based call center and put the agents back in clinics to handle the more challenging scheduling requests.  

What’s the Idea?

The idea is simple – move your operation from a central location back into individual clinics by leveraging the WFH model and technology platforms.  This model puts scheduling teams inside clinics (decentralized) but manages them with centralized technology that you likely already own.  You just need to configure the clinic specific groups and a call handling overflow model within that technology. Think of it like a work-from-home call center, except the “home” is the clinic. Hire local schedulers who can build relationships with doctors and patients, while your current tech keeps everything efficient behind the scenes.

How It Comes Together

In-Clinic Schedulers: These folks handle inbound calls, wait lists, rescheduling, outbound reminders, and schedule management. They know the doctor’s preferences inside out.  They can also work real time to squeeze in and fill same day appointments. Their personal relationship with the doctor ensures smooth interactions between the patients and the doctors.  Calls that come in outside of clinic hours can be handled by US based WFH agents/nurses that have connections to the community.

Centralized Tech: If you have a centralized call center, you likely already have most of the technology that can support this model.  You will likely need to change your skillset groups and ensure you have overflow coverage in other local clinics for when any of your staff are out of office, but any standard call center platform should work here.  Now if you haven’t updated your call center in 20 years, please contact us!  We are happy to talk with you to share all the amazing improvements that have happened in this space for you, your staff, and patients.  There are now affordable call center platforms for all sizes of clinics.

Training Made Easy: Centralized call centers come with some big advantages over clinic-only scheduling.  One of those big advantages is training. New hires get trained centrally—online or in-person—before heading to clinics, so busy staff aren’t stuck playing teacher and new employees aren’t left to fend for themselves in the clinic.

The Payoff

Patients get a personal touch by talking to someone who is local, knows them, knows their doctor, and has a personal interest in them. Doctors maintain some control over their schedules, which boosts their morale and retention. And organizations save money by streamlining operations. One clinic saw a 25% drop in scheduling errors after switching to this model, patient satisfaction rose 8%, and provider schedule utilization rose 5%, as providers no longer purposefully blocked out time to make up for errors made in the contact center.

Next Up

Technology is the backbone of this approach. In our next piece, we’ll explore how thoughtful use of AI will empower you in ways that up until now have not been possible.

Picture this: You’re feeling under the weather and need to see your doctor. You call the office, wait on hold forever with an off-shore call center, and finally learn the next appointment is weeks away. Frustrating, right? For too many people, this is what healthcare feels like—a system built around the needs of the organization, not the patients. But what if we flipped that around and focused on the patient?

The Problem with Today’s Systems

Most healthcare setups prioritize what’s easiest for the company—centralized call centers or clunky websites that demand endless logins. Patients are left struggling to book appointments. They can never get their questions answered by their local clinic. Meanwhile, doctors are buried under an ever increasing load of patient messages because their centralized scheduling system isn’t set up to act for them and a vicious spiraling cycle is created. 

After a while, no matter how much we love our doctors, when it’s hard to connect with them, most of us give up and go elsewhere.

A Patient-First Approach

The secret to fixing this? Focus on the patient first, then the doctor. Focusing on these two groups will ensure greater success for the entire organization.

That means making it painless for people to find you, contact you, and schedule appointments. It doesn’t have to be perfect—just good enough to keep patients coming back.

Enter the Decentralized Centralized Model

One smart solution is a hybrid approach or a decentralized centralized model. It places scheduling teams right in the clinics to keep things personal, while using centrally administered technology to keep everything running smoothly. It’s the best of both worlds: a friendly, familiar voice for patients and cost-effective efficiency for the organization.

Why It Matters

When patients can easily book appointments and doctors have schedules that work for them, everyone wins. In this blog series “Transforming Patient Experience in Healthcare”, we’ll cover how and why a hybrid approach works, technology tools that enable the model, how nurse lines fit in, financial upsides, overcoming challenges, and where patient experience is headed in the future. In our next article, we’ll dive into how this model works and why it’s a game-changer.

I fangirled when I experienced design thinking for the first time with IDEO. I mean, I really fangirled in a way I never have when encountering celebrities. I first had my eyes opened by IDEO in a video shared in business school…the infamous shopping cart video. A few years later, I had the incredible opportunity to work with and learn from IDEO. I soaked up design thinking like a sponge. The most fundamental lessons I learned came before any innovation even started.

One of the key components that differentiate Design Thinking from traditional problem solving approaches is the art of framing challenges. Instead of starting with a rigid problem statement, Design Thinking encourages us to phrase challenges using the open-ended and optimistic “How Might We” format. This small linguistic shift plays a pivotal role in shaping the mindset of problem solvers and kickstarts innovation that delivers creative, collaborative, and user-centered solutions. Each of these seemingly three simple words have been selected for specific purposes. Let’s break them down.

How
The “How” part of the question encourages a mindset of exploration and curiosity. It assumes that the problem can be solved in at least one, if not multiple ways. It focuses on the act of solving the problem already through action.

Might
The “Might” part of the question is when ideation becomes a natural extension of the problem solving process. It creates a fertile ground for brainstorming sessions where teams can freely generate and explore a multitude of ideas without feeling constrained by predefined problem boundaries. Instead of should or would or will which implies there’s only one right answer, using “might” shifts the focus from constraints and limitations to possibilities and opportunities. This open-ended approach stimulates creative thinking and allows for a broader exploration of potential solutions.

We
The “We” part of the question is inherently positive and inclusive, fostering a collaborative atmosphere. It implies that the challenge is a shared responsibility, inviting input from diverse perspectives. This inclusivity enhances team collaboration and generates a sense of ownership among team members.

Next time you’re in a meeting or even just trying to work through a problem on your own, try phrasing the problem in the form of a “How might we…” question and you’ll be amazed at how quickly the creative juices start flowing.

If you’re interested in learning more about Design Thinking or hosting a highly interactive, fun, and effective session for your team, please reach out to Julie Lee (julie@leedanconsulting.com) for more information.

For as long as I can remember, I have never wanted to start my own company. Having spent my childhood in a small family-owned business, I craved the stability and perceived freedom I associated with the corporate world. As I progressed in my career, I began to recognize that the perception I had of the corporate world wasn’t fully accurate or fair. I kept seeking out the perfect trifecta for me – a company that was purpose-led with strong values, an executive team whose actions and words aligned with those values, and a role that was challenging for me where I could continue to learn and grow. Every time I thought I had found it, something happened that showed me I hadn’t yet. I was growing more and more disillusioned.

Then, a new friend that I met over a networking breakfast asked me, “why haven’t you started your own business?” I answered with my usual response of “I’m a single mom with 3 kids and I don’t really want to take the risk.” As I was driving home from that meeting, I had a moment of clarity. I realized everything I had told her was an excuse. One that really didn’t hold water anymore. That was on a Friday. By the following Tuesday, Leedan Consulting LLC was established. Now that Leedan is a year old, it is a good time to pause, reflect, and set an intention for the future.

Get Ready for a Crazy Hat Collection
When I joined a company as an employee, I had access to all sorts of resources. Need a Microsoft Word or PowerPoint template? Go to the company intranet or ask the marketing department. Have an issue with my paycheck? Talk to HR or accounting. Need more pens and paper? Swing by the office supply room.

When I started my own business, I pretty much had nothing. Everything had to be created or procured. I was the CEO, CFO, CMO, CRO, COO, CTO, general counsel, graphic designer, webmaster, copywriter, scheduler, custodian, accountant, travel agent, sales team, and more. I had to draw on all of my experiences and skill sets, some of which hadn’t been used in decades. I had to decide which functions I wanted to handle myself and which ones should be outsourced to specialists. I had to wear so many hats on any given day that my head was constantly spinning.

Emotional Roller Coaster
Starting my own business reminded me a lot of being a new mother. I could start the day on the highest high and end on the lowest low and vice versa. I had moments of self-doubt and wondering what the hell I got myself into. I would vacillate from wanting to jump back into the relative safety and familiarity of being a corporate employee to never wanting to work for someone else again. Some days I even contemplated what it would be like to become a hermit and live off the land (although that thought never lasts long given I’m an extrovert who hates insects and has a black thumb).

The bottom line is that I didn’t anticipate the magnitude of the emotional roller coaster that starting my own business and being accountable only to myself would bring. I also realized I didn’t have to do it alone. There were many people willing and able to help along the way. Leaning on trusted advisors, practicing self-care, and having a supportive domestic partner helped me navigate these ups and downs. I learned to give myself grace and to celebrate the little wins, even if it was just managing to figure out WordPress enough to publish a small change to the website.

Getting Over My Hangups
As a sole proprietor, I am responsible and accountable for building my sales pipeline and executing on contracts. Even when I leverage independent contractors, I am still on the hook. I have always had an aversion to business development and sales because it felt slimy and inauthentic to me. Obviously this aversion is a major roadblock when starting a new business. I have had to consciously change my mindset into looking at networking as reconnecting with old friends and colleagues or meeting new potential friends to share knowledge and solve problems together. If an engagement or referral comes of it, great! If not, it’s still great because I got to fill my bucket with human connection and interesting discussions.

Gratitude and Manifestations Matter
I believe strongly in the law of attraction. I create annual vision boards and practice gratitude regularly. When I start feeling overwhelmed or downtrodden, I recenter myself by expressing gratitude for what I do have. I focus on the process of building the business – writing content, reaching out to people – rather than on the outcome of revenue. And you know what? That authentic positive energy comes back in spades. I have had wonderful referral business from friends and colleagues I respect. I’ve been able to connect people who may have never met otherwise. I have been able to give back to my local community of women leaders and developed strong friendships as a result. I am manifesting my future one day at a time and I’m excited to see what’s to come.

The Future is Bright
Starting a business was exhilarating! I wanted a role that was challenging. Being a business owner is certainly that! As Leedan Consulting grows and adds full time employees, I intend to leverage my personal values into creating a culture of radical transparency and integrity where every person can bring their whole, authentic selves to work every day solving problems for clients that help make this world a better place. I want to show my kids that they have the power to change their own lives by challenging their perceptions and limitations. I aim to build lasting relationships that are mutually uplifting, especially in ways that support other women and minorities. I am creating the trifecta I’ve been searching for my whole career and making it accessible to others who seek the same. Most importantly, I am eternally grateful for the multitude of people who have, and continue to, believe in me and support me on this journey.