The situation
The program I inherited had been quietly losing ground for years. A legacy medication therapy management (MTM) call center — responsible for reaching health plan members and completing time-sensitive medication reviews — had seen completion rates against contracted targets decline roughly 15% over two years. Not one bad quarter — a slow, compounding erosion that had become the new normal.
The timing made it harder. The program had just been through an acquisition, and the brief performance uptick that came with the deal closing had already plateaued. Customers were watching, contracts were on the line, and the team needed a plan that could hold up to scrutiny — not a new set of targets pulled from thin air.
Getting underneath the numbers
The easy move would have been to treat this as a productivity problem and lean on the team to "do more." Pushing harder on a broken process usually just breaks it faster, so before proposing a fix, I worked to understand where volume was actually getting lost — sitting with the data, the call center operators, and the clinical staff doing outreach every day.
The problem wasn't one thing — it was three, compounding on each other:
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Staffing capacity
The team was simply understaffed relative to the volume the contracts required — no outreach strategy in the world fixes a team that doesn't have enough hands.
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Data quality
A high rate of bad or disconnected phone numbers was capping outreach before a single call was dialed — the team was working hard against a target that was structurally out of reach.
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Outreach strategy
Dialing windows, call scripts, and channel mix weren't tuned to when and how members actually wanted to be reached, so even successful connections were converting less often than they should have.
Building — and running — the recovery plan
I built the recovery plan and the completion-rate forecast used to reset customer-facing targets for the rest of the year — an uncomfortable but necessary conversation, since it meant telling customers the truth rather than promising a number that sounded better but wasn't achievable.
From there, I worked with clinical operations, data science, and outside vendor partners to execute against all three pillars at once — the timeline didn't allow for solving them in sequence. Staffing up without fixing the data would have just meant more people calling dead numbers; fixing the data without changing outreach strategy would have left connection rates flat. That meant coordinating workstreams that don't normally sit under one plan: hiring and training, data infrastructure, and front-line script and scheduling changes.
Throughout, I ran a weekly tracking rhythm so leadership and customers could see real, current progress against the reset targets — transparency the program hadn't had before, and one that mattered as much as the operational fixes in rebuilding customer trust.
What changed
Within the first month of executing the plan, the trajectory shifted from a plateaued decline to a documented, trackable recovery:
More durably, the program moved from reacting to a decline it didn't fully understand to operating against a plan it could explain, defend, and adjust in real time — which is what rebuilt customer confidence during a period when that confidence was genuinely at risk.
See the actual recovery plan
The real deck behind this case study — root-cause diagnosis, the three-pillar plan, and the early proof points shared with leadership and customers. PDF, 11 slides.
Figures reflect internal performance metrics generalized for public sharing; specific customer names, contract terms, and financial figures have been omitted.