Durable medical equipment provider cuts hold times and keeps customer satisfaction above 90%

Every customer request arrived through one channel: the phone. A single human agent could hold one conversation at a time, so 1,500 daily calls turned directly into long queues and 15-minute average waits. For someone calling to reorder oxygen, that wait was not a minor annoyance.

The phone-only model created several compounding problems:

• Long hold times on time-sensitive needs. Fifteen minutes on hold is a poor experience for anyone. For a patient waiting to confirm an oxygen refill or a CPAP supply, it eroded trust in a company whose whole promise is dependable care.
• Communication loops that never closed. Requests moved between patients, referral sources, and internal staff with no reliable way to confirm that a loop had actually been closed.
• Thin documentation. Phone conversations left little consistent record, which made follow-up and hand-offs harder and slower.
• Volume against a wide product line. The company serves a broad catalog across retail and insurance channels, so agents fielded a constant, varied stream of questions with no way to triage or parallelize the work.
• Morale and turnover. The rigidity of back-to-back phone calls wore on the team. High call pressure fed burnout, and burnout fed turnover, which only made the volume problem worse.

Rather than replace the human team, Quiq widened how that team could work and gave customers channels beyond the phone. The rollout was phased.

• Live-agent digital messaging. Quiq opened web chat and SMS for live agents and trained 25 skilled staff to work in the platform. Because messaging is asynchronous, one agent now runs up to five conversations at once instead of a single phone call, which pulls people out of the hold queue faster.
• IVR-to-SMS handoff. This was the change customers felt most. The phone system offers an off-ramp: press a key and continue by text instead of waiting on the line. The prompt is as plain as “Our wait time is about 10 minutes. Press 1 if you’d like us to text you.”
• Proactive AI on web chat. The company runs web chat with conversation starters optimized to whatever device the customer is on, so the entry point matches how they arrived.
• Proactive AI agent SMS outreach.  Appointment reminders, refill opportunities, insurance information updates, and outreach to people approaching Medicare eligibility. Every messaging interaction ends with a survey, which is what feeds the satisfaction scores.
• Analytics built into daily management. The Director uses Quiq’s reporting daily to track first-contact resolution, CSAT, hold times, and per-agent throughput, and to run performance reviews from real data.

• A caller skips the hold queue. Instead of waiting 15 minutes, the caller presses a key and moves to SMS, then handles the request on their own schedule. The most common feedback the team hears: “Thank goodness I don’t have to hold anymore.”
• The company reaches out first. A customer approaching a refill date, an appointment, or Medicare eligibility gets a proactive text rather than having to remember to call, which quietly removes future calls from the queue.
• One agent, five conversations. A specialist who would have been locked to a single phone call now moves several messaging threads forward at once, so more customers get served in the same shift.

For the support team, digital channels changed the texture of the workday. Agents are no longer chained to one call at a time, and the variety and flexibility of messaging made the work less rigid and the team measurably happier. Demand to work in the platform is high enough that the company onboards agents in waves. As the Director put it, agents “fight over being on Quiq.”

Because the team is staffed with clinical specialists, routing messaging conversations to the right expert also speeds up first-contact resolution. And with survey data flowing in after every interaction, managers coach from real numbers instead of anecdotes.

Opening digital channels and giving callers an exit from the hold queue turned a phone-bound support operation into one that can absorb more volume without proportional strain on the team.

• Average hold time fell 53% as customers switched to text or took care of their needs through the proactive AI agent.
• Customer satisfaction has held above 90% across the most recent 90 days, with individual agent scores of 4.75 to 5.0 out of 5.
• Each agent now handles up to five conversations at once, versus one phone call at a time.
• Employee morale improved as messaging added variety and reduced the pressure of continuous calls, directly supporting the company’s goal of lowering turnover.
• Communication with referral sources, a core part of the business model, improved as those partners began using the same channels.