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Most contact centers overpay for AI because they don’t ask the vendor the right questions before buying.

Here’s one of the most important:

AI vendors will tell you they can contain 35% of your calls.
Most buyers never ask: 35% of what?
That question changes everything.

Here’s the math vendors don’t walk you through:

Total call volume: 100,000
Calls the AI can actually handle: 10,000
Vendor’s claimed containment rate: 35%
Actual calls contained: 3,500

That’s 3.5% of your total call volume. Not 35%.

The vendor isn’t lying, technically. Their AI does contain 35% of the calls it’s eligible to handle. But if you assumed that number applied to your full call population, your business case just fell apart.

Token-based pricing makes this worse.

The AI may still process all 100,000 calls to figure out which ones it can handle. So you’re paying for 100,000 calls worth of processing to resolve 3,500. Your true cost per contained call is far higher than the headline rate suggests.

Before you sign anything, ask these four questions:

1. Does your containment rate apply to total call volume or only eligible calls?
2. How many of my actual calls can your AI handle?
3. What is the true cost per contained call, including all processing?
4. Will you guarantee the outcome and put compensation at risk if you miss it?

Savings claims without performance guarantees aren’t guarantees.
They’re projections.

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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.

“We had 1,000 people use our self-help tool and nobody called afterward.”

He thought that was a success. That’s when I knew we had a problem.

Last year, a leader showed me their self-help tool for scheduling appointments.
To complete a booking, patients had to click through the same chat button four times. 

Most gave up before they could finish scheduling their appointment.
But instead of calling, they just went somewhere else.

This is the risk of an unexamined assumption.

Silence after a self-help interaction may look like success. 
But you don’t know what it means until you track:

– Did the customer who used your self-help tool get what they came for?
– If not, did they contact you through a different channel instead?
– Or did they abandon you entirely?

Without answers to those questions, low call volume after self-help isn’t a win. 
It’s a blind spot.

The goal of self-help isn’t to deflect calls. 
It’s to actually resolve the interaction. 
Here’s how to design it that way:

First, start by understanding why people are contacting you. Look at:

– Call recording transcripts
– Help article traffic
– Chat logs

Then build self-help around the simple, repeatable interactions first:

– Scheduling
– Basic troubleshooting
– Straightforward account questions

Get those right before you build anything more complex.

A self-help tool that doesn’t resolve the issue isn’t reducing your contact volume. 
It’s just moving the failure somewhere you can’t see 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.

Patient satisfaction in healthcare has 3 distinct steps.

Most practices only measure the last one.

The sequence looks like this:

Step 1: The scheduling experience.
Whether the patient books online or calls in, that interaction sets the tone. It’s the first impression your practice makes. And most satisfaction surveys barely touch it.

Step 2: The in-clinic experience.
This is the medical assistant who checks the patient in, gets them settled, and prepares them for the visit.

Step 3: The physician interaction.
This is where most practices focus all their attention. And because patients generally have a strong relationship with their doctor, the scores are usually high. 

The problem is what that high score can hide.

When you only measure what happens in the exam room,
You’re only measuring the patients who got through, not the ones who didn’t.

If scheduling is slow, confusing, or hard to access, 
Some patients give up before they ever reach steps 2 or 3. 
They never show up in your data because they never showed up at all.

Access is a leading indicator. 
Physician satisfaction is a lagging one.

This matters even more if you’re using a BPO or outside partner for patient scheduling. 
You need data on the full experience, not just what happens on your floor.

If you want to talk through how to structure your patient satisfaction measurement, send me a DM.

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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 contact centers are still running QA the old way.

They’re only getting a fraction of the value QA can deliver.

The old QA model looked something like this:

– Manually listen-in on a sample of calls each month
– Score whether agents followed your processes
– Report on agent performance

It told you how agents were doing, but not much else.

Modern AI QA tools have changed that entirely. They now:

– Analyze every single interaction, not just a sample
– Detect customer tone and sentiment in real time
– Identify patterns and trends at scale

At that scale, the questions you can ask change entirely.

Instead of only asking: Did the agent handle the call correctly?

Now you can find answers to:

– Why are these calls happening at all?
– Are our internal processes actually resolving the issue?
– Where in the business is the real problem originating?

Take this example from a healthcare client:

Call volume up. Satisfaction down. Angry patients. 
On the surface, it looked like an agent problem.

But the QA data told a different story.

The same pattern kept surfacing: patients calling in angry because they’d shown up to appointments and their physician wasn’t there. No notice. No rescheduling.

It turned out the physician’s team hadn’t been notifying patients when they’d be absent.

The contact center was the first place that failure showed up. 
But the problem originated two steps upstream
Not in the contact center.

That’s what modern QA makes possible. 

– Fewer unnecessary calls
– Faster root cause identification
– Processes that actually get fixed upstream

Most contact centers are sitting on this data right now.
Few are using it to look beyond agent performance.

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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 didn’t plan to build contact centers from scratch across seven countries.

I just kept saying yes to the jobs nobody else wanted.

Frontline Agent
– Started on the phones straight out of college
– Applied for team supervisor twice, didn’t get it twice
– Tried interviewing for a corporate support role, didn’t get that either

Early Management
– Applied for the roles I wanted, got handed the ones nobody else would take
– 24/7 responsibility, small accounts, a city nobody wanted to relocate to
– But each one taught me something my first-pick role wouldn’t have

Account Manager → Site Director
– Got the “difficult” client nobody wanted to take on, and made them happy
– That one decision led to a major retail account landing in my lap without an interview
– Grew it to 4 sites, 800+ agents, and became site director for a multi-billion dollar tech client

International Operations
– Got passed over for account VP, said yes to running the international operation instead
– Built seven international sites from scratch: facilities, technology, legal, all of it
– Learned more about contact centers than I could have in any US-based role

When my boss eventually left, I inherited the full account and grew it:
10,000+ agents and 1,200+ support staff across multiple countries

Every stage followed the same pattern:
– The role I wanted, I didn’t get.
– The role nobody else wanted, I took.

Those jobs weren’t glamorous
But they were where I learned the most
And where I built the credibility that eventually led to bigger things.

Taking the tough stuff nobody else wants is where you can learn the most.

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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.

My first call as a frontline agent changed how I lead contact centers.

20+ years later, I still use what I learned in every training class.

I was doing McAfee technical support. 
It was my first day on the phones.

A woman called in with a virus on her machine. 
She really needed her computer and it wasn’t working.
I was ready to help. But then something unexpected happened:

My mind went completely blank.

So I raised my hand. 
A mentor came over and pointed out where to find the answer in my tools.
I walked the customer through removing the Trojan horse virus herself.

When we finished, the customer was extremely grateful. 
The gratitude in her voice when she hung up stayed with me.

I took away three things from that call:

First: Tools matter a lot. 
Agents don’t need the best recall. 
But they do need the right resources and the training to use them.

Second: I could do it. 
That moment of realizing you’re capable, is something every new agent needs to reach.
It doesn’t happen in a classroom. It happens on a live call, with a real customer, when something goes wrong and you figure it out anyway.

Third: What we actually do in a contact center is help people get their lives back on track. 
It doesn’t matter if it’s tech support, patient scheduling, or a nurse line. 
The customer isn’t calling because they want to talk to us. 
They’re calling because something in their life isn’t working. Our job is to fix that.

Not every leader gets time on the phones early in their career. I did.
That experience taught me what agents actually need to perform well
And why so many training programs and tool investments miss the mark.

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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.

Outpatient providers are stuck between two bad options:

1. Burn out your physicians with after-hours calls
2. Leave patients with no access outside business hours

Here’s how to build a system that solves for both:

First, you have to define what actually requires after-hours escalation.

A patient forgot to request their prescription before a Friday trip?
That can wait until morning.

A patient showing signs of post-surgical complications at 10pm?
That requires a doctor.

Your system needs to identify and route them correctly.

For most outpatient practices, the answer is an outside answering service. 
Internal staffing only makes sense if you’re running a group of 400+ physicians.

Either way, the service needs two things:

1. Fast answer times
Target 30-45 seconds. Patients calling after-hours are already worried. Long waits make it worse.

2. Clear rules
Define what counts as an emergency, what can wait until morning, and who gets paged for what.

The answering service’s job is not to solve every clinical issue.
Its job is to answer quickly, identify the category of the call, and route it correctly.

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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.

The best contact center leaders I’ve seen all balanced 3 things at once.
Most people you’ll interview only care about one.

When you’re restructuring, outsourcing, or building a contact center from scratch 
The person you appoint to lead it internally will make or break the outcome.

In my experience, candidates fall into one of 3 types:

The quality obsessive

Passionate about patient or customer satisfaction above everything else. Unrealistic about what it costs to deliver it. Will push for the best possible experience regardless of budget. Quality at any cost isn’t a strategy.

The technology purist

Believes the answer to everything is automation. Wants every interaction to be system-driven and transaction-based. Ends up building something robotic that neither customers nor agents want to use.

The cost cutter

Laser-focused on labor efficiency. Knows exactly how many seconds they can shave off a call and what that saves. Loses sight of the fact that cutting too deep damages the experience and ultimately costs more.

Each one brings something to the table.
But what you need is someone who brings all three.

They must understand that quality, cost, and technology aren’t competing priorities. 
They’re interdependent. Pull too hard on any one of them and the other two suffer.

I’ve overseen thousands of contact center hires.
Most executives know when they’ve hired the wrong person.
Far fewer know what right looks like before they make the call.

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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.

Want to improve quality scores and lower costs at the same time?

Focus on First Contact Resolution.

Most contact centers treat FCR as simply a customer satisfaction metric. 
It’s actually one of the most powerful cost levers in your operation.

Here’s why:

Every unresolved call is a callback. Every callback is an additional interaction you’re staffing and paying for. Improve your FCR rate and call volume drops. When call volume drops, so does your headcount requirement.

I worked with one clinic that came to me at 45% first contact resolution.
We found that every 2% improvement in FCR was worth 3 people’s worth of labor.
At $50,000/yr per agent, that’s $150,000 in savings from moving one metric by 2 points.

The reason FCR suffers in most operations comes down to one thing:
Agents aren’t empowered to resolve the call on the spot.

They can’t answer the question. 
They escalate, transfer, or tell the patient to call back.
In any case, costs compound and customers become frustrated.

The fix is straightforward: 
Give your frontline the tools, information, and authority to resolve calls on the spot.

Your customers and patients don’t want to be calling you in the first place. 
The faster you resolve their issue, the better their experience.
And the fewer times they call back, the lower your costs.

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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.

A contact center that isn’t continuously improving is falling behind. 

Self-audits are how the best operations stay ahead.

Here’s how to run one:

Step 1: Baseline everything.

Ask your contact center leader for the last ~12 months of data. Make sure you get attrition, average handle time, and absenteeism. Trend all of it and look for outlier months. 

How fast your leaders can produce these numbers is already telling you something.

Step 2: Benchmark against your industry.

Go to ChatGPT or Gemini. Tell it about your industry, your call types, your patients or customers. Ask what metrics you should be watching and what the averages are for your space. 

It’ll pull published benchmarks and give you a starting point for comparison.

Step 3: Pick 3-4 leading indicators.

Once you’ve got your baselines and benchmarks for every metric, identify the 3-4 that will most directly drive performance improvement and build your improvement plans around those specifically.

Lastly, avoid framing this as a punitive audit. If people think you’re there to catch them doing something wrong, the process tends to break down. Keep the focus on improvement, and people are much more likely to actually engage with it.

The best-run contact centers aren’t doing this once a year. They’re doing it all the time.

When was the last time your contact center data was audited?

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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.