For healthcare organizations, customer experience doesn’t begin with patients. It begins with the employees who support them.
That reality sits at the heart of Sun River Health’s contact center transformation story — and it’s why the organization’s experience stands out amid the AI‑heavy conversations dominating Enterprise Connect 2026.
In a recent CX Today interview, Eric Brosius, Vice President of Technology Services at Sun River Health, shared how internal IT friction, not technology limitations, became the catalyst for meaningful change — and how a focused investment in contact center modernization delivered measurable outcomes across employee experience (EX) and patient experience (PX).
Watch the Full Interview
The Business Problem: Internal Friction Was Hurting Care Delivery
Sun River Health, one of New York’s largest Federally Qualified Health Centers, supports dozens of clinical and administrative sites across the state. Like many healthcare organizations, it operates in a high‑pressure environment where downtime, delays, or inefficiencies quickly cascade into patient impact.
Before its transformation, Sun River Health faced several interconnected challenges:
- Clinicians and staff struggled to get timely IT support
- Help desk teams were overwhelmed and reactive
- Managers lacked visibility into call quality and sentiment
- Complaints increased, but root causes were difficult to pinpoint
The issue wasn’t a lack of effort. It was a lack of insight.
IT leaders spent excessive time listening to call recordings, manually reviewing interactions, and trying to reconstruct what went wrong — long after the fact. Agents were frustrated. End users were frustrated. And leadership knew the model wasn’t sustainable.
As Brosius explained, when providers can’t get help quickly, patients ultimately feel the impact. Fixing CX meant fixing EX first.
The Investment Driver: Efficiency, Visibility, and Scale
Rather than chasing a new vendor, Sun River Health looked to its existing UC partner: RingCentral.
The organization had already standardized on RingCentral for communications. The next step was extending that investment into the contact center, with a specific goal: reduce friction and improve visibility without increasing complexity.
Key drivers behind the investment included:
- Reducing manual quality monitoring and management overhead
- Accelerating agent onboarding and training
- Improving first‑call resolution
- Lowering agent turnover driven by frustration and inefficiency
- Creating a more consistent, measurable support experience
The organization implemented RingCentral RingCX, with a strong emphasis on AI‑driven quality management (QM) and sentiment analysis.
The Approach: AI as a Visibility Tool, Not a Replacement
Importantly, Sun River Health didn’t deploy AI to replace agents or automate away human interaction.
Instead, AI was used as a visibility and insight layer.
RingCentral’s AI‑powered QM capabilities allowed managers to understand what was happening across interactions without manually reviewing every call. Sentiment analysis highlighted problem areas, surfaced patterns, and enabled leaders to intervene earlier — before frustration escalated.
That said, Brosius was candid about early missteps.
Like many organizations, Sun River Health initially underestimated the planning required to make AI meaningful. Keyword triggers and sentiment models weren’t sufficiently tuned, resulting in insights that lacked context.
The lesson was straightforward but critical: garbage in, garbage out still applies to AI.
By investing time in configuration, refining triggers, and continuously iterating based on real interactions, the organization began to see the full value of the platform.
The Results: Measurable Improvements Across EX and PX
Once properly tuned, the results were significant.
Sun River Health achieved:
- First‑call resolution rates between 93% and 95%, well above industry averages
- Faster agent onboarding, reducing training time and ramp‑up effort
- Lower agent turnover, driven by reduced frustration and clearer expectations
- Higher end‑user satisfaction, with fewer escalations and complaints
- Improved patient experience, enabled by faster, more reliable internal support
Notably, the impact extended beyond IT.
Sun River Health applied similar AI‑driven quality and insight models to clinical workflows, including transition‑of‑care nursing teams. These teams play a critical role in ensuring patients discharged from hospitals receive follow‑up care within seven days — a key factor in reducing emergency room readmissions.
By applying lessons learned from the IT help desk, Sun River Health improved visibility into nurse‑patient interactions, identified negative sentiment early, and supported teams with better coaching and insight.
Lessons Learned: What CX Leaders Should Take Away
Several lessons from Sun River Health’s experience stand out for CX and healthcare leaders:
- EX is not optional
You cannot improve customer or patient experience if employees are fighting systems every day. - AI requires discipline
AI delivers value only when use cases are well‑defined, data is curated, and teams are prepared to iterate. - Visibility beats automation
Insight into what’s happening — and why — matters more than blindly automating interactions. - Start where friction hurts most
Internal support functions are often the fastest way to unlock downstream CX gains. - Leverage existing platforms
Building on a trusted communications foundation reduces complexity and accelerates adoption.
A Broader CX Message
Sun River Health’s story reinforces a growing theme across Enterprise Connect 2026: customer experience and employee experience are inseparable.
AI doesn’t magically fix broken processes. But when applied thoughtfully — as RingCentral’s platform was here — it can remove friction, restore focus, and help organizations deliver on their mission.
For healthcare providers especially, that mission goes far beyond metrics.
It’s about enabling people to care for people — without technology getting in the way.
