Episode Transcript
[00:00:03] Speaker A: Welcome to the Table Service podcast where we'll dish on all things support, success and beyond with the people and companies building the future of customer experience. Table Service is presented by Tableau Consulting and I'm your host, Jordan Hooker. Mark Hollis is a seasoned leader in building and scaling customer support teams from the ground up for high growth healthcare technology startups like CityBlock Health, Collective Health and Castlight Health. He brings a wealth of insights on creating customer support systems that scale with success. Today, Mark is here to talk about technology in the healthcare tech industry and its evolution over the last 20 years.
Mark, welcome to the table.
[00:00:46] Speaker B: Thank you, Jordan. Thank you.
[00:00:47] Speaker A: Would love to just take a moment for our listeners who may not be familiar with you to hear a little bit about your background. Let's hear the story.
[00:00:55] Speaker B: For the last 14 years my focus has been on primarily high growth startups. I've been really fortunate. Starting in 2010 I joined Castlight Health and I'll name just a few. Over those last 14 years, if we look at Castlight Health, Collective Health, City Block Health, those alone were sort of darlings of the healthcare tech industry. They each raised over 500 million in venture revenue. In CityBlock's case, they achieved several billion dollars in revenue, annual revenue quite quickly. So I was really fortunate to be in San Francisco and New York with companies that had the resources both for talent recruitment for my teams and for the right tools that we could facilitate their success in service of the members. And I also growingly love to have that second audience, the clinicians that my teams are help.
[00:01:58] Speaker A: Yeah. So having of course been in the healthcare tech space for a very significant amount of time. So I'd love to hear a little bit about how technology has changed, particularly in terms of customer support, customer experience. What have you seen change in those 14 years of working in this space?
[00:02:16] Speaker B: Certainly, if I may, I'm even going to tack a prequel onto that right before because I think it tells a good story. Right before the health tech segment, I started out in 2000 with a startup in Tempe, Arizona and their goal was to create a shop nationally and buy local tool. But the really the data and the infrastructure wasn't there. We didn't have Google, we didn't have that whole cloud mesh system. So it was ahead of its time. But in their research I traveled to Silicon Valley and to Denver and to other places to look at product partners. We created a customer service product and before things were cloud based the way we were as a startup, able to win customers, Fortune 100 customers from large BPOs was we were one of the first adopters of a software based telephony switch. So I saw the evolution. I had been at a BPO called Affiliated Computer Services before this, where you had giant Avaya premise based telephony. It took telecom engineers to keep it up. If you needed a request made even for a sequence change in your scripting, it took weeks. Well, now we had something, you know, that I could carry that sat in a server room. There was a black box called Interactive Intelligence. It started out premise based, but it was software based and we were able to win most of at that time, AT&T hadn't come back together, but SBC, which was like a $30 billion a year company and part of AT&T took us on as a client to just do basic transactional third party verification. And because of that technology shift, we were able to win and go from zero to handling about 55,000 calls a day. They were very short, just transactional calls. So I fell in love with the, even though I'm not an engineer or product manager with that kind of technology awareness and meeting with the engineers that we're setting up for us business users in customer support. If you jump forward, I got an opportunity to work in San Francisco and we were at Castlight Health. It was the first transparency healthcare shopping tool. So we sold to large employer groups and once they were on, they were putting their employees for the first time on high deductible health plans. So there was skin in the game for both sides. But it was new territory and they needed to be educated for it to be even slightly fair because they were giving them a powerful resource. For the first time ever, a member of a Safeway grocery store, our first commercial client, could log on and because of this technology, it would pull where they were in their benefit year with their spend. And based on that benefit structure, if they typed in MRI of the left knee with contrast, it could actually look at all their accumulators, where they were in their spend for that year, what their deductible design was, and it could give them an exact dollar amount for that out of pocket cost for that MRI at the hospital, at the facility across the street. And oftentimes it would be 1500 $2000 in price difference. And we also had a quality tool that could show you could save money and increase quality by shopping yourself. So it was very heady stuff, it was very exciting, but it was also so new and it wasn't perfect, it was nascent. So we member support team that I stood up from zero that were really advocates and navigators as most healthcare startups still need to have. So we were interfacing constantly with product and engineering and customer success and implementation teams. And we went all the way from Safeway to spending two years to win Walmart's 900,000 eligible members that were on plans that we could service because of design. So that was my entry into healthcare tech and it was just an amazing, amazing accumulation of talent. So many people, especially women from Castlight, have launched companies like Brightline Health. Naomi Allen has launched that, Alira Health, Dr. Dina Bravada was one of the co founders of that. The list just went on and on of people launching from there. So I was fortunate enough as this customer service manager to get exposed to for the first time design people and product managers and doctors that needed our data from the support center and the technology. Kind of to your original question, we were also still using interactive intelligence. I had gone back to that first company and we were working through them to use interactive intelligence. And so right away we had complementary data points that the clinicians needed because they had their clinical work, their algorithms they could run but they didn't know is a 20 minute call material. As far as quality outcomes are. Some people are saying it needs to be 50 minutes. We could help give them kind of the missing elements for that.
[00:07:39] Speaker A: Sure.
[00:07:39] Speaker B: So that was my, my starting point. I would like to jump up to, to collective health because there and city block. But that's my starting point.
[00:07:49] Speaker A: It's very interesting to me to hear, you know, these perspectives on this technology that now to me seems very standard. I mean, if you have a benefit administration platform with you managing your benefits and your health care, your employees expect to be able to log in and see where am I at with my, my deductibles, what will this procedure cost? Like these are things that people I think now relatively take for granted. But we're talking technology was not that far back when this was not available to us. So it's been very interesting to see that change and growth of that technology as we've moved now into, into this era of healthcare tech.
[00:08:26] Speaker B: Right. Let's jump to collective health. By the way, let me also say the relevance of what CastLife was doing for the first time in 2013 before our IPO the following year, Giok, our founder, was interviewed with Stephen Brill for his Time cover piece called the Bitter Pill. And it talked about the opacity and the lack of transparency in the healthcare ecosystem. And to the point, what you said, yes, members can log on to their United Healthcare or their Aetna plan, but the shopping component is still sometimes missing. As far as actually being able to say my out of pocket that I can shop for for this procedure is going to be $180. So that's just a clarification. I wanted to make sure. In 2014, some colleagues from Castlight introduced me to collective health. It sou maybe boring at first because they were considered a tpa, a third party administrator, but again they were using technology to galvanize and supercharge what could be done. So here's the difference. At Collective Health we thought we would help small and medium sized companies go from being fully insured to being self insured, basically controlling their own budget. As an insurance company, essentially we were very surprised with out of the Gate again, we started from zero and the technology helped us with this. We went out of the gate for employer groups like SpaceX, Activision Blizzard, Gaming company, Uber Palantir. So they weren't huge traditional enterprise, but they were rapid growing new enterprise. And what was cool is their benefits leaders were just acquiring not only their own health care benefits, but they were first adopters of those third party benefits like Livongo for diabetes management, Lira for mental health. Again things we might think of as standard now, but those employers were offering that to their employees. And so what we did especially yes, our navigators are advocates at Collective Health could help navigate and explain the benefits. But what those clients also expected is for us to use our talent and our technology to help increase utilization of those other parties they were investing heavily in. So it started out with, let's just say Activision Blizzard coming into San Francisco to Collective Health, meeting with my team and of course the other clinical and data teams. But for our team, they were looking for us at first, first to use our existing and now we'd moved into the cloud we were using at that time we're experimenting with a sort of a nascent Elassian product for ticketing. And we were still using interactive intelligence. And this was 2014 premise based because our CTO was still leery about the reliability and redundancy of cloud based telephony. And so Mercer and Activision Blizzard as an example would come in and they would say, okay, we want to know what are the indicators that we can have that will steer people without them even being able to formulate the question to get them to Livongo or Telera. So at first they would just shadow the advocates and see what they were doing. Of course we had the wav files and we had the video screen scrapes and they were also watching live. But what that led to is at first we trained our agents. If this subject matter is coming up, then you should recommend this other product and introduce them to it later. Collective Health I believe was able to patent and build an automated product that would basically key in on this and basically do the steering in the ticketing itself. So that was another exciting evolution, sort of pre AI of what we were able to do with healthcare technology that was in house, starting anecdotally and then building the product ourselves, which was a lot of fun.
[00:12:56] Speaker A: So from that time I feel like, you know, as we're talking 2013, 2014, we've really seen an acceleration over the last 10 years of this technology. Can you talk a little bit about your experience with startup?
[00:13:07] Speaker B: Definitely. It becomes a super hockey stick of acceleration. The CTO that I mentioned just a year later, I think we happened to both meet in south park and he was working with a startup I was working with other and he's like, hey, I love this cloud based, cloud based talk desk. It's incredible. I can do so many things. I know it's just something as a business owner I can change things on the fly, create customized reporting without asking or any lift from engineering or our product. So again, we're still sort of in the past, things are moving so fast. But that was a big change. I mean here we had a brilliant, he was a NASA engineer before Collective Health and now we're both loving pure cloud based telephony and SMS and the integration of Top Desk jumping a couple of years after that. Each year there's this incredible gathering called CS Lab, Customer Service Lab that's hosted by Conti is her name and she would always have sponsorship, usually by Zendesk and Salesforce among others. And I remember sitting, I brought some of my young managers with me because it was such a good professional experience to see all the guest speakers of what was new on the horizon. And I was whispering to some of the Zendesk people as their VP of product was up talking. I go, when are you guys going to get HIPAA certified so we can consider you as our CRM and ticket? And I go, we're so excited. He's going to announce it here first and it's going to go out as a press release later today. But we got our HIPAA and now I know that sounds old school, but I think that was maybe 2015. It might have been a year or two earlier, but so many of us were Waiting. Because I think one of the things that's germane to this discussion is one of the changes that's happening is before the conversation was kind of capsuled, you had this standard like do we go with Salesforce? Sort of the Chevy Impala at that time, you know, that did a little bit of everything and you could build it up was super powerful. But Zendesk is on that rise and we hear it's elegant but you know, maybe too light and a lot of times the showstopper. In fact, we at first didn't use Zendesk at Collective when we were vetting with the team for almost a year. When they came in to present, it was like we always hear of people moving from Zendesk to Salesforce as they scale or from Sugar to Salesforce. We never hear the reverse. Well, I don't think that's true any longer. I think it's not just Zendesk, but there's so many incredible CRM products that now they're, they're, you know, they're bomb proof as far as their HIPAA and their phi, their, their, their, the depth of their API. You are really deep and they're just very flexible. The implementation times are so fast, the integration times are so quick. So now the problem is sort of the reverse. How do you select from so many offerings and so many. So much noise in statements and you know, I think I'm going to mention it and it'll be in your show notes, but there's an incredible resource called Elion in Elion Health IT Marketplace and they're really presenting almost weekly updates on the new technology options, whether it's AI tools for historic QA or for real time assistance or for industry specific health care analysis, trend analysis like authentics or observe AI for QA, 100% first pass QA, you know, those type of tools. But again, that's part of the exciting arc of history.
Even with the CRMs and the cloud based telephony. I want to spend some time on the city block health story starting in New York City.
[00:17:18] Speaker A: I think that'd be a great transition. I mean, I think we're seeing this, you know, this very interesting timeline of technology. I mean we, we're building this healthcare tech, but the reality was our support tools as support leaders, experienced leaders, didn't really match because we're dealing with phi, we're dealing with pii. We've got to have that HIPAA compliance if we don't want to be the next front page newspaper story tomorrow. And so seeing a Lot of these companies, Zendesk included, Intercom included, finally start to go, oh my gosh, this space is exploding. We best be able to get in here and compete with Salesforce Service Cloud because as you mentioned at that point we were, we were all kind of stuck with Salesforce Service Cloud for, for a long time, which is a very powerful tool but it's incredibly expensive to implement, it's incredibly expensive to maintain. And so it's been an interesting experience over I think the last about 10 years, really having a lot more options. Let's zero in then on, on the experience with CityBlock Health. I think that'll be a great segue into more modern times time.
[00:18:18] Speaker B: Yes. And one more little point on that. Not even those players but now the add ons that you tack on for far QA are for workforce management, etc. Now it's so prevalent that you probably have an online BAA that you can, you know, usually are we going to do it with our lawyers and our paper, is it going to be yours? And went back and forth and it's not. If you ask now and you have a baa, yes, you can take care of that in a few keystrokes.
[00:18:47] Speaker A: So absolutely, yeah. And it changes that experience so much. I think it is now becoming rarer to me to encounter a vendor that doesn't have that available to me than it was even five years ago. So I've been very happy to see that change for the healthcare tech industry for sure.
[00:19:05] Speaker B: So I think the next step, I'll start the beginning of this story. It won't have any revolutionary next generation tech, but it will show you how vital tech was.
I joined city block in 2019, moved from San Francisco to Brooklyn. My wife and I moved 29 times over our 30 years of marriage. That move was the biggest ask to leave from San Francisco to Brooklyn where she's never been. But I just felt when they reached out that this was important. Of course we all didn't know that just a few months later Covid was going to take the country.
We were not knowing that. I consider it even though this might not be the right definition kind of moral luck because we were working with marginalized Medicaid members in inner city areas. As a starting point we had traditional clinics at city block starting in Crown Heights in Brooklyn and we offered full wraparound services that included primary care, behavioral health, social determinants of health, dietitians. The whole wraparound element that now is, you know, of course has so much traction and we were offering it to those Most in need. Our client was Emblem Health Plan of New York. So they took this big chance on us, and we took a big chance because we were at full risk for basically taking huge attributions of their members in these inner city areas and improving their health outcomes. And if we could improve those health outcomes and also come in under that annual allotment of money they had given us, then we got to keep the difference. And first, before COVID one of the existential questions at CityBlock was, what is the real acuity of our patient base and can we increase quality outcomes to survive existentially, to survive as a company and to scale, which usually community health can't go beyond the community. Can we? Can we basically increase panel size, increase quality and reduce cost to make this business work for more in need?
The clinicians, of course, had the heavy work. They're studying their algorithms and they're going through case by case with those assigned to the members to study the acuity. But concurrently, since we had just stood up against Zendesk and Talkdesk, which they had never had before, their clinics were broken. We started that stand up because we found out through data analysis that 100 work mobile phones that had been given out using AT&T data. The calls were getting into rabbit holes. Members that were trying to reach their social worker to get the primary care, the nurse were not getting to a human being. The same with previous iterations of telephony as most startups. They might have had RingCentral here and dial Pad there. And so there were a lot of numbers that were not maintained anymore. So we stood up enterprise. We centralized operations and getting ready for other states to roll out. But we went to New York because of state market delays and before COVID and we said, I visited the clinics and I said, we have enterprise technology or 30% of your members are not getting to their health team. At least let us play air traffic control. We'll just repoint all of those numbers, whether they're working or not, toward one number. We'll train our team to just do air traffic control. We'll give you ticketing that you've never had before, so you can see intraday touch points to earn your trust, and then we'll work on the more complex. So we won their trust before COVID on just air traffic control because we had Talk Desk and Zendesk.
We were hiring at the same time to create a virtual line of business. So my team actually, which was a wonderful experience, I was helping interview and hire and train RNs Nurse Practitioners, Behavioral therapists, primary care physicians, psychiatrists, they were all part of our pods we were creating. So city block leadership came and said, we're working on the quality elements a health clinical elements. But we have POD leads that are saying we cannot stretch our panels from 30 or 40 to 60 or 70.
It will cause a drop in quality. So we complemented their data with looking at POD by pod that we put on top desk for the virtual care starting point because they could be handed off to physical clinics. And we found out that many were saying, back to my earlier point example, it takes for material Clinical outcomes 50 minutes Average call duration for us to make a difference. And then others were saying, I'm hitting my target numbers, I'm dialing 80 times a day. And so they would almost get false kudos like, wow, you know, they're performing. But what we really found is the one pod.
Their average handle time was around 20 minutes. They were setting the goals each week with those patient members and explaining to them they had other members to meet at the end of those 20, 30 minutes. It was something that they were both practices. They were doing smart lessons with them as far as how to, you know, do things in a timely way. So we found out average call duration could be 20 minutes. And we found out that some of the teams were only average five minutes, not 50 minutes. And they were getting a kind of a false measurement and it wasn't material phone interaction. So we also complemented that with this is just basics. We now had the tools to record in a virtual environment with teams that not were not normally on call center tools. We telehealth teams, we could look at occupancy and utilization. And it came down to the POD that was able to hit the stretch go. Their manager already had them queued up. They were logging into the eight systems required 10 minutes, as they should have been before starting shift time. Their breaks were 15 minutes as prescribed by schedule adherence. Their lunches were appropriate to that time. So if you pulled a print out of their sheet, and again, this is just basic concentrate things. But they hadn't had this element before. You would see if you improve that intraday, that occupancy, and if you aim for that 20 minute without socialization, that's not necessary. We can serve more members and survive and move to New York, Massachusetts, Connecticut, North Carolina, Ohio, et cetera, which has been the trajectory. So maybe that's boring to some people, but I found that I loved working with that clinical ops audience and our members. It was in service of them. It was also reducing the burden on those clinical teams. So we're using that base technology. At CityBlock I had approval from corporate to put AI on top of that. At the time we were going to use GONG IO that was developed for sales teams but it could be used for service teams to do 100% AI quick passive QA to free up your QA humans for higher order tasks at that time. And this has changed. It's one of the interesting things. We had a brilliant contact at GONG West Point grad engineer knew the product left and right. Our product team was working with them at that time. 2019 they found out that GONG worked beautifully with Salesforce but it couldn't work with Zendesk metadata. I'm sure that's been rectified since then because you know, Zendesk is such a big player. But we had to put a pause on it so I didn't get to formalize my use of that. And so that's what I've been working on since then is really my next goal is to join a company where the AI products as I mentioned for quality analysis and real time agent assistance. And I'm a little still leery of this. In the gen AI world, the AI agent if it's preferred by the end user, I think we're probably almost there. So I just met for instance two weeks ago with a group called Spark CX at the Scottsdale Airpark here in Arizona. And it was one of the most futuristic meetings I've ever been at. First of all, I drive there as I'm pulling in Gulf Stream after Gulf Stream is coming in over the McDowell Mountains and landing just queuing up into Scottsdale Airport. I pull into there, they're sharing a space with this new generation, I think it's called NextSpace to where they're just using a space there, but they basically offer spaces for companies and you go in and for instance the conference rooms, they immediately the full glass walls go to different levels of opacity depending on what you want. The screens, which would be wonderful for support centers, especially in healthcare, you want to observe clients to see your teams, but you have to watch Phi and how patients. He said, mark, notice all the monitors while you're in here and then go outside. When you go outside, it's not just having to have that, you know, kind of cluj layover screen monitor. Once you're outside, you could have clients there. And without violating Phi, you're not seeing anything on any of the screens in the room. The also the acoustic settings immediately with different levels of nuance. You as a musician in your former life will appreciate that. The way they could adjust the nuance of acoustics for a meeting or for a live performer were incredible. But that's not their core product, that was just their space.
They're a group that sort of defected from Amazon Connect which is their big differentiator. They're using Gen AI to basically do analysis, trend analysis, coaching analysis, etc. But I think think their differentiator is they understand with Amazon, excuse me, Connect that they can scale at just the flip of a switch or even not requiring the flip of switch just based on spike indicators. Also too, when I mentioned something about a current group I was helping with licensing issues, they smiled and they said that's another component that's very simple here we basically you're not tied into a, a peak or valley licensing structure. You're basically it's usage based but at a cost effective usage base. Because we all know that there were bpo for instance call centers where if you were on a per minute once you scaled you wanted to actually go to dedicated FTEs. You didn't want to stay on a per minute because it didn't make the, the economics didn't work. But now they've kind of flipped it back to where you can use their, you know, on demand and it just automatically ramps basically similar to what you can do on Cyber Monday. As far as international scale, instead of millions, billions, I'm tracking them, I'm meeting with them again, very interested in a similar subject is BPO evolution and I think this is something relevant to this conversation. Very excited by groups like Hero Partners. I've met with them a couple of times and they, they've done something really cool. Two things, they have a flex program which I would always ask about when I was at small startups and way back when you went to a bpo, that's another thing that changed. Before it was only Salesforce and it was expensive, before it was acs like I was at or some of the other big players. They wouldn't even talk to a startup if you couldn't book a hundred FTEs. You know, we're talking about hundreds of thousands of dollars a month. They would just say try this, you know, and the technology at the, the other options wasn't there at the time. And so now you have BPOs like Partner Hero. Not only do they have these flex hours where you can go as a startup as low as 40 hours and it's not in a block, you can use three hours at Thursday night from 8 to 10pm 10 hours on Wednesday intraday during main overflow hours and then go up from there. And then I remember just a few years ago asking a BPO that we were going to do a pilot with when I was at Suki AI, a medical transcription AI company, another darling that's growing rapidly. But at that time I asked the US BPO and they said again, we're not using AI Eye for our QA because it would reduce our billable FTE headcount. I was shocked that they would say that. Well now Partner Hero is making it quite transparent that they have a augmented AI tool that if you're, if you can't afford and you don't want the implementation time that's there as part of the package, I mean it's an add on. But I just think those are extreme exciting for smaller companies as well as large companies.
[00:32:58] Speaker A: Yeah, absolutely. And just kind of thinking towards, you know our, our times now is we have so many healthcare tech companies that are popping up. I mean and every day we see a new one pop up and every day we probably see two shut down. I mean it's just a constant growth. I would love to hear your thoughts on how these companies can take this modern technology that we've been talking about and start utilizing that to drive value for their employees, for their support teams, for their customers. I'd love to hear more, more about that.
[00:33:30] Speaker B: So you know, I think again this would really sound old school but we've done it at very savvy companies when we first start I'm a big advocate of even not doing a basic ivr of getting human being that's reaching out either in chat or especially phone to a human being for your best learning opportunity for as long as you can do that. To just experiment and learn firsthand from that voice or chat exchange that's a live performance and then make your decisions about automation and I don't even like this word but the appropriate quality deflection to the right channel. So I think, I think some of these tools, number one, there's a more sophisticated for healthcare tech companies and probably most there's a more sophisticated even entry level employee now and it allows them to utilize that in a conversational manner instead of scripted. Let's look at the evolution. Just a few years ago a lot of small and enterprise support teams would not allow, they would basically lock down and allow Google searches for their agents to do their job. I think now we've broken down that barrier in many cases to where, you know, a remote patient monitoring company that does chronic care management like I worked at, at my nurse AI, we said yes, because at that time our health coaches were also having to troubleshoot remote devices. So of course they should be able to get on Google instead of having to build a separate sop. And if there's a manufacturer video and knowledge base article on how to use this trace blood pressure cup and what error codes mean that they can pull up in seconds and share coaching with the patient real time without having to drop off and even send them that resource. So you know, that's stage one, but a lot of companies were very reluctant to open that up. I think we're seeing a similar concern, especially in healthcare support with AI tools in ChatGPT.
But again I was able as a senior manager to get on the lines and actually answer some support questions and I would type it into chat GPT and you know, of course vet it and compare it against some other resources and find answers to individuals that you know, were you just launched with a smart ring and you didn't have your knowledge base article and your SOP was still being built. So you're going out and you're finding something and you're seeing if it works and experimenting and then you can build the larger SOP internally and you can fragment and I think what the AI tools are making faster is you can draft those sops with the tools faster, you can fragment those into usable real time answers faster. Even before you buy the pure formalized product, you can do things like use the Initial Gemini tool for example and just have it scan all of your PDF SOPs and have your questions ask individual fragmented answers and get it, you know, instantaneously. So that's a CX improvement for the member. Real time without a warm transfer or a callback ping pong. It's actually a reduction in FTE because of the speed it's done. So that that's just one area because we have that first level to where it's used as a QA tool, it's used as a real time assistant. But even before it's formalized, there's a technology out there that can be used in a learning manner and create a better CX experience.
[00:37:35] Speaker A: Absolutely. I think the more we can equip our folks especially very early on to go be curious to go be self starters and not block that path. I mean set some guidelines, give some boundaries, make sure that we're being wise and what we're doing, but not restricting folks and letting them go find solutions to problems will drive incredible value and incredible growth from a support team. So I'm very much aligned with you.
[00:37:59] Speaker B: That there I use the term empathy with agency and I think that adds to what you were just saying because we've all had the customer service rep to where you know right away by the tone and pace they are not going to answer my question and it's very scripted. So okay, let's move away and we've got a better generation to where they're allowed. They've got, they've got conversational guidelines that they've been trained on and they're conversational and they're super cheery and they're saying they're going to do the moon. They're basically over promising. Yeah.
[00:38:33] Speaker A: I think that that concept of empathy with agency is incredible because we have seen a lot of support teams I feel like that have grown that empathy muscle but there's no ability for them to go do the things that they need to do. And I'm certainly happy from a human experience standpoint for customer support teams to have a better experience and customers to have a better experience just in terms of a positive human interaction. But and then equipping them to go and actually solve the problem. I mean that's a, that's a 2 for 1 win right there for a customer reaching out needing help. Well Mark, as we wrap up this conversation, love to hear any closing thoughts you have. I know earlier we talked about one resource. I think you may have some additional ones you might be interested in sharing. Would love to hear about.
[00:39:16] Speaker B: I really and I'm not sponsored by any of these people. I kind of peppered it already and insinuated in a lot of people that really keep me excited. So I'll give you the links to this that you can publish the Elion Health IT Marketplace they have everything from IT products like we've been talking about comparisons and pricing to webinars with brilliant panel. I was on one that one wasn't brilliant but with people like Claire Fry who was at Oscar and now she's with one of the redesigned spin ups right now with her and the host Bobby Gerlich going through call center one on one. I think another one is a cool group. Have you ever listened or read any of the postings by Danielle Pore? I'm probably mispronouncing. Her last name is P O R E H. She has her PhD in engineering from UC Berkeley and she's got this podcast and website called out of Power Pocket Health and she has this incredible sense of humor and she is really tackling a lot of the call center health care scenarios with cogent, you know, aspects and guests. So her site is worth a look. We already mentioned this customer service CS Labs that Sophie Conti has been running. They just had their 10th anniversary. I love those and I love to take take young managers to it because it really shows a small boutique type gathering because they're not big events, they deliberately keep them curated. But it shows the professional level that you can stay in customer service for your whole career and there is that upward trajectory. So I love that. So I'll give you up more of the resources. But yeah, those are some that stand out.
[00:41:02] Speaker A: Yeah, we'll definitely keep those down in the show notes as well. For for those listening. And then the last question for you, Mark, if folks wanted to hear more from you, connect with you, what's the best way for them to do that?
[00:41:11] Speaker B: Sure. Very simple. I think I got my gmail account in 2004, so it's mark.hollismail.com and I'm on LinkedIn.
[00:41:22] Speaker A: I'll make sure to link to that in the show notes as well so folks can connect with you easy there. Well, Mark, thank you so much for joining us here at the Table for this conversation. I think this idea of being able able to see this huge expanse of time, of of healthcare tech and, and how support teams have fit inside of that and driven growth in that has been a really interesting thing. So thanks for taking the time and sharing your your thoughts and experience with us.
[00:41:46] Speaker B: You're welcome. Thanks for the opportunity.
[00:41:49] Speaker A: Thanks for listening to the Table Service podcast. You can learn more about today's guest in the Show Notes below. Table Service is presented by Tavolo Consulting, hosted by Jordan Hooker, music by Epidemic Sound.
