Case Study: Inspira Health

Inspira Health is a large teaching community health system serving South Jersey, where patients depend on local access to care. When Inspira centralized scheduling across its ambulatory practices, the vision outpaced the infrastructure: supervisors lacked real-time data, abandonment rates varied widely, and front-desk staff were overwhelmed by overflow calls the system could not manage. After a rigorous vendor evaluation, Inspira deployed NiCE CXone to bring visibility, accountability, and skills-based routing to a centralized Access Center that onboards new specialties approximately every four weeks. In one year, the full-year abandonment rate dropped from 24% to 10%, calls redirected to front desks fell by approximately 50%, and patient loyalty scores reached their highest levels on record, all while the Access Center continuously expanded its scope.

01 BEFORE

Flying blind in a community that depends on access

Inspira Health is a large teaching community health system serving South Jersey, a region where patients depend on local access to care. Three years ago, Inspira launched a bold initiative: a centralized access center to handle scheduling across its ambulatory practices, from primary care to surgical oncology, so that front-desk staff could focus on the patients in front of them rather than the phones behind them.

The vision was right. The infrastructure was not ready for it.

Prior to launch, the Access Center and each practice operated on their own distinct phone systems. This setup led to variation in how calls were handled, with abandonment rates differing depending on whether calls went to voicemail at the practice or were answered by an agent or front-desk staff. At the front desk, there was no way to record calls. The Access Center had call recording but with certain limitations, including missing features such as tagging that could enhance productivity. These factors had an impact on the system’s ability to focus on key performance indicators, such as after-call work. Supervisors did their best to manage situations, often relying on experience and intuition to respond quickly. When the scheduling team encountered difficulties, feedback was anecdotal rather than supported by real-time data that could offer insights into root causes and inform immediate solutions.

Before centralization, practices thoughtfully managed their own scheduling processes. Typically, two or three front-desk staff handled check-in, check-out, and incoming calls concurrently, working hard to meet patients’ needs. At one representative primary care practice, abandonment rates sometimes reached 17%. Patients experienced longer hold times and calls would overflow to front desk voicemails, awaiting follow-up when staff were able to respond.

Without the tools to report on abandoned calls at the practice level, voicemails occasionally went unchecked and some patients remained unscheduled. The business case for centralization was not always easy to present to providers who had successfully managed their own scheduling for years and understandably valued their autonomy. Inspira’s need was not just for a better phone system, but also for greater visibility to help support practices and providers in delivering the best patient experience.

02 DESIRE TO CHANGE

A rigorous search for a long-term partner

Inspira’s Access Transformation team, which included a Lean Six Sigma-certified project manager, ran a structured evaluation before committing to a platform. They assessed multiple vendors, including Microsoft Teams, Talkdesk, and NiCE CXone, scoring each across five categories: departmental operational need, staff experience, staff preference, data reporting, and IT technical specifications. Each capability was graded on a development maturity scale from beginning development through advanced development.

NiCE CXone scored 45 out of 48 evaluated features. Its closest competitor scored 22. The gap was not just about what the platforms could do today. It was about how far along each was on the capabilities Inspira planned to need for future optimizations. CXone had twice the feature coverage at a more advanced stage of development, and the difference was decisive.

“We just couldn’t pinpoint where to address our focus. We knew agents weren’t getting onto calls as quickly as possible. But where was the gap? What could we change quickly to support the needs of our patients and staff?”

Nicole Wright

Clinical Director of Access & Coordination
Inspira Health

The evaluation also had a longer horizon in mind. Inspira was planning its migration to a new electronic health records platform. The team specifically looked for a contact center solution with a strong track record integrating with the EHR, and NiCE had documented implementations with peer health systems that competitors could not match. Crucially, the Access Transformation team looked to those peer organizations to understand what they wished they had done differently. That intelligence shaped the final decision.

Implementation was not seamless. Early training was less comprehensive than the team had hoped, and the first months surfaced gaps between what Inspira needed and what had been configured. But NiCE responded. A Technical Account Manager who could speak directly with Inspira’s leadership was assigned to the account. Skills were rebuilt. Reports were redesigned. Focused training sessions were scheduled around specific pain points.

When a particular challenge arose that NiCE was not certain how to address, they said so directly. That transparency, more than any polished product pitch, built the trust the partnership needed to succeed.

03 NiCE SOLUTION

Visibility that changed everything

The core of Inspira’s transformation was not a single feature. It was the shift from operating in the dark to operating with real-time and historical intelligence. For the first time, supervisors had queue dashboards they could act on in the moment. Managers had weekly trend data they could use to plan ahead. The Associate Director of Access had month-to-month visibility into performance trajectories. The hierarchy was clean, and it ran on data.

A Growth Ladder Built on Evidence

Skills-based routing gave Inspira the ability to build its pod structure with precision: grouping agents by specialty, measuring call volume by pod, and making the business case for a staffing growth architecture that did not exist before. Rep 1s handle their assigned pod. Rep 2s, compensated at a higher rate, cover multiple pods and can be dynamically shifted when one specialty sees a volume spike. Senior agents are positioned to step into mentoring roles.

The platform made visible what the work required, and Inspira built its career architecture around that evidence rather than assumptions.

A Structured Accountability Model

Inspira built its accountability structure around what the platform made visible. Supervisors own real-time monitoring: when a scheduling team’s abandonment rate climbs past a defined threshold, they shift Rep 2 agents, trained across more than one medical specialty team, to absorb the volume. Managers own week-over-week review. The Associate Director of Access owns month-to-month trend analysis. Every level of the organization has a defined view and a defined responsibility.

Call recording, absent entirely in the previous environment, enabled a new coaching culture. After-call work is now tracked, and when an agent’s wrap time spikes, supervisors can listen to the call and understand why. The question shifted from ‘what happened?’ to ‘what do we do next?’

“When staff can see the actual results because of the actions they’re taking, that’s empowerment. Morale is tied to employees feeling like they’re making a difference. CXone made that visible.”

Nicole Wright

Clinical Director of Access & Coordination
Inspira Health

04 RESULTS

A 14-point swing in one year, while adding practices every month

The numbers Inspira posted are remarkable on their own. They are more remarkable in context: throughout this period, the Access Center was onboarding a new specialty or location approximately every four weeks. Performance did not slip. It improved.

Abandonment Rate: 24% to 10%

When the Access Center went live on CXone, abandonment rates initially rose. This is an expected pattern when any new system goes live and teams are in learning mode. The team started the year at 24% across all pods. By year-end, that figure had dropped to 10%. The goal is 7%, and Inspira is on a clear trajectory toward it.

A single PCP practice illustrates the magnitude of the change. Under the previous decentralized model, with two or three front-desk staff splitting scheduling duties alongside check-in and check-out, abandonment ran at 17%. That same practice now operates at 10-11%, served by 26 centralized agents rather than a handful of overwhelmed front-desk staff. To match that performance in a decentralized model would require two to three additional FTEs per practice. Multiplied across 60-plus practices across all specialties, the staffing math and financial impact are impossible to reconcile. Centralization, enabled by CXone’s visibility, made it achievable.

Front-Desk Overflow: Down 50%

Calls redirected to front desks (those that overflow when patients have been on hold for more than three minutes) dropped from approximately 1,200 per week to between 600 and 800. That is 400 to 600 fewer calls per week landing on the front-desk staff that centralization was designed to protect.

Average Speed of Answer: Down 10 Seconds

Average speed of answer fell from 1 minute 20 seconds in January 2025 to 1 minute 10 seconds in January 2026. Ten seconds may sound modest, but it was achieved while the Access Center continuously expanded its scope, onboarding new specialties every four weeks. Sustaining improvement during rapid growth is an outcome most contact centers do not achieve.

Patient Experience: Held Steady Through a Major Transition

Patient experience scores held firm across the transition, a meaningful result given that patients shifted from calling a familiar front-desk contact to reaching a centralized team they had never met. Ease of contacting (2023 YTD: 91.2 vs. 2025 YTD: 90.8) and ease of scheduling (2023 YTD: 92.86 vs. 2025 YTD: 92.95) remained essentially flat. Likelihood to recommend improved, rising from 94.6 in 2023 to 95.1 in 2025.

Agent Morale and Accountability: Both Improved

Supervisors can now articulate exactly what happened on their teams on any given day: not a vague reference to callouts and a difficult afternoon, but a data-backed account of where volume spiked, which pod needed support, and how the intervention played out. That precision gave agents something equally valuable: proof that their work matters.

05 Future

EHR integration, AI chatbots, and a growth ladder that keeps building

Inspira’s next chapter arrives this summer with the go-live of the new EHR. The integration will enable patients to self-schedule through an online patient portal, a capability the team expects to meaningfully reduce inbound call volume and give agents the capacity to focus on complex interactions that genuinely require a human touch. The contact center that CXone helped build is positioned to absorb that shift without disruption.

On the near-term roadmap: AI-powered chatbots to handle informational calls (directions, hours, appointment reminders) that currently consume agent time without requiring a live conversation. Workforce Management, the next CXone module Inspira plans to deploy, will enable optimized scheduling of agent shifts, breaks, and training time with the same data-driven discipline the team has applied to routing and staffing.

For a community health system in a region where patients have few alternatives, access is not an abstraction. Every call that goes unanswered, every appointment that does not get scheduled, has a patient on the other end of it. Inspira built a system that serves its community, and NiCE CXone gave them the intelligence to keep making it better.

“We started our year at 24% abandonment rate. We ended that year at 10%. And we wouldn’t have been able to do that without the data and accountability that NiCE CXone gave us.”

Nicole Wright

Clinical Director of Access & Coordination
Inspira Health