Case Study: VGM Group

VGM Group is a healthcare member organization whose Homelink business unit coordinates transportation, supply delivery, clinical services, and language support for patients across the country. As business volume grew, patient care coordinators were consuming significant time on manual outbound coordination. VGM activated a seven-phase transformation, rebuilding a fragmented IVR, deploying NiCE Workforce Management, and launching NiCE AI Agents for Proactive Engagement to automate coordination work at scale. Monthly automated patient journeys grew 7x since launch, more than 230,000 journeys have been completed to date, and VGM absorbed continued business growth without adding headcount.

01 BEFORE

A platform built for more. An organization ready to use it.

VGM Group is a healthcare member organization serving the home medical equipment, orthotics and prosthetics, and audiology markets. Its largest business unit, Homelink, functions as a nationwide network manager, the coordinating layer between patients, payers, and providers for transportation, supply delivery, clinical services, and language support. When a patient needs a wheelchair, a CPAP supply reorder, or a ride to a dialysis appointment, Homelink is who makes it happen.

That work is coordination-intensive by nature, and VGM was doing all of it manually. A single transportation arrangement could require as many as five outbound calls from a patient care coordinator: scheduling, confirming, rescheduling, confirming again. Supply reorders, language services, and clinical care follow-ups ran the same pattern. The volume was unsustainable, and the technology to automate it was already sitting in VGM’s contract, untouched.

VGM had already invested in NiCE CXone and NiCE Workforce Management. Both were live on paper, but far below their potential, misunderstood, under configured, and leaving significant capability unused.

When Kandace Forster, Director of Workforce Management, arrived, she began mapping what was actually happening inside the platform. The IVR had grown to more than 240 routing skills, some of which led callers to dead ends. Abandonment was widespread and nobody was tracking it. Supervisors operated on instinct. Different teams pulled different metrics, none of them aligned, none of them capturing what was actually being lost.

Digging deeper, she found a specific configuration that had been silently compounding the problem for years. VGM had set its call rollover threshold at 45 seconds, meaning any unanswered call automatically transferred out of the contact center and into RingCentral — VGM’s telephony platform, where outbound patient care coordinators were trying to do their actual jobs. Those teams were being buried in inbound calls they were never supposed to take. Much of the original setup had been configured by third-party vendors, and it had taken someone looking at the full picture to connect the dots.

02 DESIRE TO CHANGE

A first-ever WFM Director, a seven-phase SOW, and a change management playbook built on early wins

VGM had a mandate and made it clear: activate the technology, automate the manual coordination work consuming PCC capacity, and build a contact center that could finally measure itself. Two months in, VGM committed to a seven-phase implementation plan to make it happen.

The technology decisions were the easier part. VGM is a complex organization built around distinct business units, each with its own identity, workflows, and resistance to change. Getting teams to route through a shared platform required more than a business case. Forster spent her first weeks sitting side by side with agents and supervisors across the organization, watching how calls were handled, learning where the real friction was, and identifying the people in each team who were ready to move.

The approach was deliberate and it compounded. The inflection point came on November 1, 2023: a fully redesigned IVR, rebuilt from more than 240 skills to fewer than 50, launched with callback capability, wait time announcements, and clean routing logic. A previous attempt had been rolled back. This one received compliments from callers on day one. Abandonment dropped. Service levels stabilized. Teams had visibility they had never had before. That win became the foundation everything else was built on, and the proof that the organization could execute.

“Our business is growing, and we didn’t have to backfill. We didn’t have to add headcount. We stabilized and we kept winning. That’s the whole point.”

Kandace Forster

Director of Workforce Management
VGM Group

03 NiCE SOLUTION

Activate, prove, scale: A phased transformation across a complex organization

VGM’s transformation followed a deliberate methodology: activate a capability with one team, work out the edge cases, document what worked, and scale it across the organization. Each phase became the blueprint for the next. The approach was slower by design and it held.

NiCE Interactive Voice Response: The foundation

Cutting the IVR from 240-plus skills to fewer than 50 gave VGM accurate reporting for the first time and corrected the 45-second rollover configuration that had been flooding the outbound PCC teams. With routing stable and visible, every subsequent capability had a real foundation to build on.

NiCE Workforce Management: Turning on the light

NiCE Workforce Management was already part of VGM’s platform investment, waiting to be fully utilized. Once it was, it gave supervisors real-time visibility into who was logged in, how teams were performing against service levels, and where cross-team dependencies were creating friction. The data changed conversations with operations leadership that had been stalled for years. Answer rate in the CXone platform increased 22% and abandonment rate decreased 20%. Schedule adherence improved by more than 20%. It also built the case for a dedicated WFM analyst role that leadership had been requesting but could not justify without evidence. That role is now permanent.

NiCE AI Agents for Proactive Engagement: Automating the coordination work

This became the program’s defining chapter. Homelink’s patient care coordinators had been spending enormous portions of their time on manual outbound coordination: multiple calls per transportation service, supply reorder reminders, language services scheduling, clinical follow-up loops. NiCE AI Agents for Proactive Engagement replaced that manual cycle with intelligent, automated outbound journeys across voice and SMS that completed patient interactions without a coordinator on the line.

VGM launched six journey types beginning with transportation and language services, then expanded to DME supply reorders, clinical services, diagnostic imaging, and hypertension specialty care. The rollout was phased and iterative, with each cycle focused on edge-case resolution and journey quality. The Proactive AI cross-departmental team earned VGM’s internal Cheer Each Other On award and the Cognigy AI Award for Proactive AI, recognitions that reflected the cultural transformation alongside the operational results.

NiCE Quality Management and NiCE Interaction Analytics

Quality Management was implemented across VGM’s frontline operations for the first time, with scoring extended beyond teams with contractual compliance requirements to all customer-facing work. CSAT was introduced as a program and now sits at 4.7 out of 5. Existing NPS email surveys were migrated into CXone to unify the feedback ecosystem. NiCE Interaction Analytics went live and is actively producing insights into call drivers and first contact resolution patterns. Real Time Interaction Guidance is implemented and positioned to deliver its full value once VGM completes its transition to the CXone Agent softphone.

Email automation and workflow acceleration

VGM built in-house automation connecting Outlook and CXone using RPA-style logic to support email processing, error cleanup, and workflow acceleration. Annual email volume handled through CXone grew from 480K in 2024 to over one million in 2025 as teams across VGM’s business units onboarded. The migration also enabled VGM to reduce and close out a third-party contract that had been relied upon for email workloads — an outcome made possible by the data and visibility CXone provided that the previous environment could not. A New Order Auto Creation workflow reduced manual intake work and was subsequently templated for the Billing team, compounding the benefit across the organization.

04 RESULTS

Growth absorbed. Headcount held. Patients served.

The AI Agents program numbers tell the most direct story. Monthly journey volumes grew from roughly 3,000 at launch to more than 22,000 by early 2025, a 7x increase in automated patient engagement. Total journeys completed since launch now exceed 230,000. Within Homelink’s transportation and language services, patient engagement rates on outbound journeys reached 87%, with 76% of services successfully completed through the automated channel without a coordinator on the line.

The operational impact on VGM’s patient care coordinator workforce has been transformative. Nineteen PCC roles have been reduced through attrition and reallocation against a stated goal of 30, while Homelink’s business volume has continued to grow. The estimated OPEX savings tied to those reductions reached $1.5 million. The story is not about headcount reduction. It is about a business that kept winning without needing to add people to do it

Workforce Management delivered its own category of wins. The claim support team, which had carried average wait times of 20 to 30 minutes, saw its average speed of answer drop to under two minutes under the guidance of a dedicated real-time analyst. That team had been asking for a WFM analyst for years before the data finally made the case impossible to ignore. The role is now filled.

Email volume flowing through CXone grew from 480K in 2024 to more than one million in 2025 as teams across VGM’s business units migrated their workflows. Order turnover time was reduced by more than 10%. The IVR, rebuilt from 240-plus skills to fewer than 50, now routes calls with precision and transparency that simply did not exist before.

The cultural shift may be the most durable result of all. Teams that once resisted sharing their workloads through CXone are now asking when they can join. Early wins created fear of missing out, and that fear created alignment across business units that had operated as separate islands for years. VGM is achieving its vision of becoming one contact center.

“We’re the middleman for a lot of services patients depend on. If we can reach out proactively and let them handle a reschedule on their own time, that’s better for them and better for us.”

Kandace Forster

Director of Workforce Management
VGM Group

05 FUTURE

Scaling what works and piloting what’s coming

The AI Agents program, proven at Homelink, is now being extended to VGM’s fulfillment and sleep services teams. The second expansion is expected to move faster: the methodology is documented, the edge cases are mapped, and the champions are already identified. Fulfillment-specific use cases include order arrival confirmations tied to insurance payout requirements, connecting patient communication directly to billing workflow for the first time.

VGM is also launching its first NiCE AI Agents for Self-Service pilot in 2026, beginning with biometric voice authentication, after-hours triage, and self-service opportunities that reduce manual workload without sacrificing the patient experience. These pilots carry forward the same foundational principle VGM has operated on since 2023: xautomate the coordination work, and free the people to do the work that genuinely requires them.

VGM also aligned with NiCE and RingCentral’s expanded partnership signed at the end of 2025, positioning the organization for deeper integration between its contact center and telephony environments as both platforms continue to mature.

The vision at VGM is a unified patient experience, regardless of which team a patient reaches, the quality of care should feel exactly the same.