When your contact team is underperforming, look at the feedback they are receiving before you look at the team.

There is a pattern I have seen repeat itself across organizations in hospice, home health, and multi-service healthcare environments.

The contact team starts receiving complaints. Response times slip. Calls feel flat. Conversions drop. Leadership notices and begins addressing the issues — individually, directly, and almost exclusively through correction.

What no one examines is the environment those agents have been operating in.

In most cases, when I look closely at an underperforming contact team, I find the same condition: the only feedback the team has been receiving is negative. Complaints get addressed. Errors get corrected. But the calls that went exactly right — the conversion that required real skill, the family that called back to say thank you, the field nurse who sent a message saying the intake notes were the best she'd ever received — those moments passed without acknowledgment.

People do not sustain performance in a vacuum of recognition. They cannot.

And in a role where the work is emotionally demanding, where the calls are sometimes desperate, where the agent is asked to hold a frightened family's uncertainty and respond with confidence and compassion — the absence of positive feedback doesn't just affect morale. It erodes the very presence that makes the work effective.

When a complaint or a service failure occurs, the Director's response has to be more than correction. It has to reflect a passionate and specific understanding of the impact — on the patient, on the family, on the referral source, on the team. Not a policy reminder. A genuine reckoning with what happened and why it cannot happen again.

That standard cuts both ways.

The same passionate specificity that addresses a failure should be present when the work goes right. The agent who listened for the worry between the breaths and earned a family's trust on a second call deserves to hear that named — not generically, but specifically. What they did. Why it mattered. What it produced for the patient.

"We can fix any mistake except poor customer service."

An incorrect phone number, a transposed date of birth, a data entry error — none of these are acceptable as a trend, but any one of them is fixable as a single issue. What is not fixable is the impression left on a family who felt, in their most vulnerable moment, that your organization did not care about their journey.

We have one opportunity to give that impression. One call. One visit. One first contact.

A strongly supported agent who makes a mistake will identify it themselves, correct it, make their concessions, and move forward with confidence intact. They understand that a misstep is not a verdict on their capability — it is information, and information can be acted on.

An agent operating without support, without recognition, without a framework that holds them — that agent crumbles. Hides the mistake. Deflects the blame. Not because they are a poor performer, but because the environment never gave them the resilience to recover.

Success in this work is built on a foundation of missteps and failures. Every experienced referral professional knows this. The difference between the ones who grow and the ones who withdraw is not the absence of mistakes. It is the resilience to continue — with the patient's needs in focus, and the confidence that the team around them will not let a single error define the standard.

Fix the conditions first. Then evaluate the team.