The challenge

A rapidly growing telehealth company felt the pressure of its own success. Its customers were healthcare companies, and as customer demand surged, so did the volume of calls and emails flooding the organization's contact center.

The company had built a strong digital offering, but the operational backbone to support explosive growth had not kept pace. Calls were backing up, in-boxes were overflowing, and the team responsible for customer experience (CX) was stretched thin.

What made the challenge harder was that the organization was brand new to CX outsourcing. They had never worked with a BPO before. They had no established governance model, no playbook for managing an outsourced partner, and limited visibility into how to forecast the volume that was coming — or how to staff against it. Like many fast-scaling companies, they simply lacked insight into expected volume and the setup needed to handle it gracefully.

The company came to TTEC because of an urgent capacity need. It needed a large ramp of associates, stood up quickly, to absorb the volume surge before it began to erode the customer experience it had worked so hard to build.

Fast ramp, smart hiring, and a new outsourcing mindset

TTEC's first priority was simple: get people in seats, quickly.

The team moved fast to recruit and onboard a large number of associates to meet the immediate volume need. To accelerate productivity, the first wave of hiring included 150 associates and was deliberately targeted at candidates with relevant healthcare experience: people who could understand the clinical context of customer interactions and get up to speed with minimal lead time. That strategy paid off; the initial ramp succeeded because the associates were ready to hit the ground running.

Subsequent waves required onboarding less experienced staff, which introduced new training and quality challenges. TTEC responded by building out training and onboarding capacity to support those later waves, ensuring that the ramp could continue without sacrificing quality. After the first wave, we scaled to 900 associates and two lines of business within two months.

We also provided proactive recommendations to help the company scale much faster, such as suggesting changes to the training curriculum to emphasize the most relevant topics. That move alone reduced training time by 29%.

But beyond putting people in seats, TTEC recognized that this client needed more than staffing — they needed to learn how to work with an outsourcing partner. The company was new to CX outsourcing, so a meaningful part of the engagement was coaching them through the ins and outs of the model. We taught them how to set expectations, how to govern the relationship, how to stay organized, and how to build the operating rhythm that makes an outsourced partnership effective. TTEC helped the client get organized and establish the disciplines that a mature outsourcing buyer takes for granted.

In doing so, TTEC positioned itself not simply as a BPO, but as a comprehensive partner, one capable of delivering across both human capital and the digital lifecycle.

Stabilizing, optimizing, and building an automation roadmap

While TTEC was scaling the human side of the operation, TTEC Digital tackled the technology side. The client's infrastructure had gaps that were limiting performance, and there was significant untapped potential in their technology stack.

TTEC Digital's consulting engagement focused on three connected priorities:

• Resolving infrastructure issues. The team addressed the underlying infrastructure problems that were holding the client back, stabilizing the environment so the contact center could perform reliably.
• Call deflection. With the infrastructure stable, TTEC Digital worked to deflect calls away from live associates where appropriate, reducing the staffing burden without compromising the patient experience.
• Maximizing Amazon Connect. The client was running on Amazon Connect, and TTEC Digital focused on getting the full value out of that platform, leveraging it alongside AI tools to optimize call deflection and workforce management.

TTEC Digital didn’t stop at the immediate fixes. Having addressed the urgent need, the team went further and built the client a roadmap for integrating automation more intelligently into their CX. The goal was to enable automation in a way that would progressively reduce the client's reliance on live staffing — not as a one-off project, but as a structured plan for the future.

The TTEC difference

With more than 40 years of CX experience, we brought a few key differentiators to the partnership:

• Speed and foresight in the same package. TTEC could ramp operations quickly and plan for future needs. The client needed this combination, rather than just one or the other.
• Human capital and digital under one roof. Because TTEC and TTEC Digital could deliver across staffing and technology, the client didn't have to coordinate across multiple vendors with competing agendas.
• Operational agility and technology integration. Unlike some competitors in the telehealth CX space, TTEC can integrate technology and adapt operationally.
• Telehealth-specific experience. TTEC brought relevant experience from comparable telehealth and virtual care engagements, so we understood the clinical and operational context from day one.

Because of our efforts, and by leveraging tenured healthcare leaders to support the launch, CSAT quickly already met the company’s 85% goal within the first week of production. The client noted they had never seen CSAT numbers this high, especially with an entirely new associate population.

We met the client’s original, immediate need – our fast ramp absorbed the volume surge, and the client's contact center stabilized. But beyond that, we gave the client something more durable than a short-term fix: a roadmap for integrating automation into its CX, a more mature operating model for working with an outsourcer, and a partner positioned to help them execute on both.