Three Answers to the Same Phone Call
Posted October 16, 2026 by Kevin K
A note from Kevin Kuhns, Senior Director of Operations – 27 years of picking up when your office calls
I’ve been here twenty-seven years. In that time, I’ve given your calls three completely different answers, and I had a hand in building two of them. I want to walk you through all three — including the one I got wrong — because the third has genuinely changed my mind about what support can be.
The first answer: a person, if you could reach one
When I started, our support line was a telephone on a desk and a human being. Some days that human being was me. I still remember the light on the phone that told you someone was holding, and how it felt to look at it while you were already mid-sentence with somebody else.
When you got through, it was good. Our technicians knew your practice, your setup, and your office manager by name. That part I’m still proud of.
But here is the thing I carried home at night: the callback list. Every evening there was a page of offices we hadn’t gotten to. Names of people who’d had a patient in the chair at eleven that morning and needed us right then. One technician can hold one conversation. The second caller waited. The third became a name on that page.
Our busiest hours were, of course, your busiest hours. Monday morning. The first of the month, when every office submits statements at once. Hiring never fixed it: you can’t staff for a peak, only for an average, and then you apologize during the peak. I have said “I’m sorry about the hold time” more than I have said almost any other sentence in my career.
The second answer: the menu — and yes, I helped build it
So we built an automated menu. I was in the room for it. I want to own that, because I’m about to criticize it.
We argued for weeks over how many options were too many. We wrote the prompts, recorded them, didn’t like them, and recorded them again. And when it went live it did exactly what we designed it to do: every call answered on the first ring, no busy signals, calls arriving at the right team already sorted.
What I didn’t understand at the time is that we had designed it around our org chart instead of around your problem.
The menu doesn’t listen. It sorts. It asks you to diagnose your own issue before it will let you describe it — but your problems don’t arrive labeled with which of our departments owns them. An X-ray that won’t attach to a claim — is that imaging or claims? That question has an answer on my side of the phone, and no answer at all on yours. So, you guessed, waited, told the whole story, and sometimes heard “let me transfer you.” Then you told it again.
We could see it in the data. People pressed zero — not a few, a lot, immediately, every day. For a while I read that as callers not using the tool correctly. Eventually I understood it was the tool being told, several thousand times a month, that it had asked the wrong question.
Here’s the plainest way I can put it, and it took me years to say it out loud: we solved the limitations of our system by moving the work onto your front desk.
The third answer: an AI technician
I’ll admit I went in skeptical. Twenty-seven years is long enough to sit through a lot of demos promising to fix support.
What changed my mind was listening to those calls. An office manager described her problem the way people actually talk — started in the middle, corrected herself halfway through. And it worked. It followed her and walked her to the fix while she sat at the keyboard. No menu. No hold.
Three differences matter more than any of the marketing:
It fixes instead of forwarding. The menu’s job was to hand you to the right technician. This one’s job is to end the call solved — settings, permissions, a report that won’t run, a step in a workflow nobody has touched since the last update.
It has no capacity limit. Twenty offices call at 8:15 on the first Monday of the month get exactly what the one office calling at 2:30 Wednesday gets. There’s no line. That callback list I used to take home doesn’t exist anymore.
It has no schedule. You work when we don’t — lunch time, internal meetings, peak times, those used to be voicemails.
And when it can’t solve something, it doesn’t dead-end you. It hands one of my technicians the full context of what you already tried, full transcript of your conversation, so you don’t start over. That was my one non-negotiable during implementation.
The number I keep looking at
Year to date, 3% of support calls are being closed by the AI technician alone — start to finish, resolved, with no hold time, no transfer, no waiting for a callback.
I’ve watched a lot of metrics in twenty-seven years. I want to be precise about why that one matters. For the entire life of the menu, that number was zero — by design. The menu’s whole purpose was to hand a warm call to a person. Every resolution we ever delivered cost a technician’s time and your time on hold.
So, 3% isn’t a small slice of something that used to happen faster. It’s a slice of your calls that no longer waits in a queue at all, and each one frees a technician for a call that truly needs a human. It’s climbing, and I expect it to keep climbing.
What I’d ask of you
Just describe the problem. Don’t sort it into a category the way my old menu trained you to. Tell it what you were doing and what happened instead. Messy and specific beats tidy and vague.
Call when it’s convenient for you, not for us. You no longer have to save a question for a gap in the schedule.
And tell me when it falls short. I mean that. I spent years misreading people pressing zero, and I’d rather not repeat the mistake.
The first answer gave you a person and a hold time. The second gave you a guess. This one gives you an answer — which, for twenty-seven years, is all any of you were calling for.
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