Newlin - Firm-Wide Call Analysis and QA Rollout

The one-paragraph version. Newlin runs on the phone, and the work is overwhelmingly outbound: roughly four and a half times as many outbound calls as inbound. Each team plays a distinct role in the claim's life, from the first intake interview to the hearing. Two patterns stand out across the firm. First, enormous time is spent waiting on Social Security, concentrated in Case Status, which alone logs more outbound talk time than the other four teams combined. Second, the inbound experience is uneven: the busiest outbound teams miss the most inbound calls, because the same people cannot do both at once. The fix on the operations side is routing and automation; the fix on the quality side is one shared, light QA rubric that gets every team into the program together.

1. The five teams at a glance

Team	Staff	Call volume (3 wk, outbound vs inbound)	Avg handle
Initial Application Initial Application . The intake interview	38	4,464 out 1,070 in	17.1 min
Client Concierge PreHearing . Inbound front door	15	1,932 out 1,233 in	8.5 min
Case Status PreHearing . SSA status retrieval	30	4,874 out 1,046 in	9.0 min
Decision Support PreHearing . Appeals and denial outreach	10	2,748 out 165 in	9.1 min
Hearing Hearing . Hearing preparation	54	6,648 out 1,053 in	7.1 min

Staff counts are roster memberships by team and include multiple roles (for example, Hearing spans case managers, skip tracers, brief writers, mail, and quality control). Handle time is the average answered inbound call. Bars are scaled to the largest value in each direction.

2. What the volume tells us

Case Status is buried in hold time with Social Security. The team logs roughly 1,300 outbound talk-hours in three weeks, more than the other four teams combined, much of it waiting on hold with SSA to retrieve a claim status. A large share of those calls end without a useful answer. This is the firm's single biggest automation and deflection opportunity: status retrieval is exactly the kind of work that technology can take off the phones.

The busiest outbound teams miss the most inbound calls. Hearing and Initial Application run the heaviest outbound loads, and inbound calls to those teams often roll to voicemail because the same staff cannot answer while they are dialing out. This is a routing and capacity pattern, not an effort problem, and it is the clearest case for an inbound queue that sends calls to whoever is free.

Initial Application is where depth lives. IA has the longest calls in the firm by far, 17 minutes on average, because the intake interview is thorough. That depth is correct and worth protecting: the accuracy and completeness of this one call shapes the strength of the claim at every later stage.

3. The opportunity map

Case Status Biggest automation win

Deflect and automate SSA status retrieval so staff stop spending over a thousand hours a month on hold for answers a system could fetch.

Hearing Biggest inbound-experience win

An inbound queue and balanced outbound load so the highest-stakes clients stop hitting voicemail, plus capturing the firm's best hearing-prep coaching as training.

Initial Application Highest-leverage quality win

Accuracy and completeness scoring on the intake interview, because an error here follows the claim through every downstream team.

Decision Support Trust and clarity win

Deliver hard news with care and stop clients being asked the same questions twice, so the appeal relationship starts on trust.

Client Concierge Consistency win

Make the warm, acknowledge-and-orient open the standard on every inbound call, so no client gets the robotic-hold version.

4. One shared QA rubric

Every team is measured against the same light standard: seven call fundamentals plus a rapport score. The rubric does not change team to team; only the weighting shifts to what each team needs most. That keeps QA simple to learn, fair across the firm, and easy to roll up.

#	Fundamental	The standard, in plain terms
1	Open	Greet, give your name and the firm
2	Verify before disclosing	Confirm who you are speaking with before sharing case detail
3	Confirm the ask	Say back what the client needs in one sentence
4	Own it and set expectations	Give a plain answer or a concrete next step with a timeframe
5	Capture and correct	Log it accurately, fix what is wrong
6	Close the loop	Recap the next step and end warmly
7	Rapport (scored)	Warm, human, and reassuring, not robotic. Scored low, medium, or high

How the weighting shifts by team

Team	Weighted toward
Initial Application	Data accuracy and completeness, correct routing
Client Concierge	Rapport and the acknowledge-and-orient open
Case Status	Plain-language answers and checking for understanding
Decision Support	Delivering hard news with care, no re-asking
Hearing	Hearing-prep clarity and honest calibration, no false hope

5. The rollout: crawl, walk, run

The goal is to get everyone in the game first, then raise the bar. The AI engine scores every call, and humans act on what it flags. Two-way flagging is the heart of it: exceptions get coached, exemplars get recognized.

Stage	What happens
Crawl: orient	Share the rubric and the Communications Excellence standard for each team. No scores held against anyone yet. Everyone learns what great sounds like.
Walk: score and recognize	The engine scores calls and surfaces exemplars to celebrate and exceptions to coach. The focus is encouragement and correction.
Run: hold accountable	With the standard understood and the coaching in place, scores become part of how the team is managed, with a human-in-the-loop QA function actioning the flags.

Why this works. The rubric is light enough that any staff member can hold it in their head, the same across every team, so recognition and coaching feel fair. The AI does the listening at scale; people do the judgment on the calls that matter. That is what turns a light QA today into real accountability and, over time, a bit of healthy competition to be the exemplar.

6. The team pages

Each team has two pages: a full analysis of its function and opportunities, and a staff-facing Communications Excellence standard.

Initial Application . Analysis and QA Initial Application . Communications Excellence Client Concierge . Analysis and QA Client Concierge . Communications Excellence Case Status . Analysis and QA Case Status . Communications Excellence Decision Support . Analysis and QA Decision Support . Communications Excellence Hearing . Analysis and QA Hearing . Communications Excellence