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HARRY’S COMMENTS: We are working with a confidential client in their search for a Director of Contact Center Operations and Patient Support based in St Louis, MO. NOTE: This job is in-office M-F, and the client will support relocation if necessary.

Having said that, this is a seriously cool gig in an iconic midwestern city I’d move to myself.

The client is a direct-to-consumer healthcare platform that treats common chronic and recurring health conditions through a streamlined digital intake experience, clinical review by licensed providers, and at-home medication delivery.

The operating team controls the patient journey from the initial online assessment through ongoing care and fulfillment, which gives the company more levers to pull on retention than the typical telehealth competitor.

About the Category

Not many people realize this, but it makes sense when you think about it: The vast majority of patient revenue in DTC healthcare today comes from a small number of chronic and recurring-care service lines where the patient relationship is naturally subscription-shaped: Think weight loss (GLP-1s), erectile dysfunction, birth control, mental health, hair loss, and so forth.

Once a patient is in active treatment for one of those conditions, the relevant unit economics — average treatment duration, monthly revenue, churn risk, and reactivation cost — look more like a high-quality consumer subscription business than like episodic medical care.

Which means the platforms that win in this category over the next several years will not necessarily be the ones with the best acquisition funnels. They’ll be the ones with the best retention engines. And that is exactly what this role is responsible for building.

The client’s Management thinks about this business the right way: That is, as a “retail subscription business” that happens to be tech-enabled in healthcare, rather than as a “healthcare business,” per se. The meds are incedental.

Meaning, an A-player candidate who has built outbound retention, customer save, and recovery programs at scale in a high-volume regulated subscription business — fintech, insurance, telecom, regulated SaaS — should put this role on their list, not skip past it because they haven’t run clinical operations.

Subscription muscle is the primary requirement. Healthcare context is learnable.

Okay, you’re probably wondering: Who’s the actual customer? Well, it’s not the marginal consumer chasing a Viagra or GLP-1 freebie. Nope. The composite patient is 25 to 55 and prioritizes convenience and discretion above almost everything else.

These are the people who self-select on the basis of discretionary income, how much they value privacy, and their view that a doctor’s waiting room as an unacceptable cost of their time. What unites them is one thing: they want to feel better about themselves, and they’ve concluded that the traditional healthcare experience has failed to make that easy.

That psychographic is the most important fact about this business.

Every condition this platform treats sits at a place where the patient’s emotional pain vastly exceeds the financial cost of the solution. Which is why retention — built on clinical continuity and physiological switching costs rather than cancellation friction — is the single highest-leverage function in the company.

So, what specifically is there for a Retention / Subscription top-gun to love about this job? Three things:

FIRST: This is a build, not a tune-up. The function previously existed under the prior operating parent and was consolidated off-shore. The new ownership group is repatriating it to a domestic call center under the company’s own roof.

You will inherit a small frontline team being on-shored (in the range of five to ten specialists on Day 1) and roughly 200–400 inbound calls per week plus about 1,000 outbound SMS contacts per week — real volume, not vanity volume. But the proactive retention, conversion, and win-back engine that should sit on top of that team — the playbooks, the segmentation logic, the outbound cadence, the measurement layer — does not yet exist. That part you build from a clean sheet.

SECOND: The reporting line tells you everything about the priority level. This role currently reports directly to a senior operating partner from the ownership group while the function is being stood up. That is by design.

The operating team has decided to keep this function close to the top of the house through the rebuild, then transition the reporting line as the function matures. In practice, that means a director with a clean idea and a defensible roadmap gets a 30-minute answer, not a 30-day decision cycle.

THIRD: The leadership team is comprised of seasoned operators with a clear mandate and a working knowledge of consumer P&Ls at meaningful scale. They are unsentimental, numerate, and they know what they have. They do not need a Director to teach them what good looks like. They need one to build it.

If you are looking to do reputation enhancing work, look no further.

Reporting directly to a senior operating partner from the ownership group, you will design and lead the patient retention, conversion, and contact center engine that determines whether the platform converts more prospective patients, drives more refills, increases renewal rates, recovers otherwise lost revenue, and resolves patient friction with empathy and urgency.

Your mission will be to …

1.) build and operationalize the outbound calling, SMS, and follow-up workflows that recover and retain revenue across the highest-LTV patient journeys;

2.) own the refill, renewal, and conversion flows across marketing, product, pharmacy, and clinical operations, including intervention workflows for every meaningful point of funnel fallout; and

3.) recruit, coach, and manage the high-performance team of patient retention, conversion, and advocacy specialists who can act as true patient advocates while delivering measurable commercial outcomes.

The role sits at the intersection of growth, operations, patient experience, pharmacy, and clinical workflows. The successful candidate will be commercially minded, patient-obsessed, and unafraid to build the engine from a clean sheet on top of a small inherited frontline team.

AREAS OF OVERSIGHT:

Patient Revenue Recovery & Retention Engine

• Design and operationalize the outbound calling, SMS, and follow-up workflow architecture that drives new patient conversions, abandoned intake and checkout recovery, prescription refill completion, renewal and revisit completion, win-back of lapsed patients, and save rates for patients at risk of churn or cancellation.
• Segment the patient base by opportunity, urgency, and clinical cohort, building targeted contact strategies for each segment rather than treating outreach as one undifferentiated motion. Recognize that a long-duration chronic-care patient at month four, a patient navigating a dosage adjustment, and a patient with an expired credit card on file each require fundamentally different scripts, timing, and channel mix.
• Develop and own the playbooks for the highest-LTV patient journeys, prioritized by the operating team. Each playbook must specify the trigger, the cohort, the channel mix, the script architecture, the handoff rules to clinical or pharmacy, and the measurement gate.
• Build the involuntary-churn recovery layer with the same rigor as the voluntary-save layer. Soft declines, hard declines, payment retries, dunning workflows, and inline payment-update mechanics are some of the cheapest dollars in the business — and they get left on the table when no one owns them.

Refill, Renewal & Conversion Flows

• Partner across marketing, product, pharmacy, and clinical operations to map every point of patient fallout in the funnel — from intake abandonment to consultation drop-off to fulfillment friction to subscription cancellation — and build the intervention workflows that close each gap.
• Create structured outreach programs for: patients eligible for a refill but not yet acting; patients nearing renewal or re-consultation windows; patients who begin but do not complete a visit; patients whose payment, prescription, pharmacy, or fulfillment issue threatens conversion or retention; and patients who may benefit from switching cadence, restarting therapy, or re-engaging with care.
• Measure every flow rigorously — with matched holdout groups wherever the volume supports it — and continuously optimize scripts, timing, channel mix, and handoffs. Platform-reported conversion numbers without a holdout are sales tools, not measurement.
• Build the cadence model around clinical reality rather than calendar convenience. Refill timing on chronic-condition medications creates physiological switching costs that no marketing program can replicate; the contact strategy must respect that.

Contact Center Leadership, On-Shoring & Team Build

• Lead the on-shoring transition of the existing frontline team from the prior off-shore configuration into the company’s domestic call center. Onboard, retrain, and re-credential the team into the company’s tooling, scripts, QA standards, and compliance posture.
• Recruit, train, coach, and manage the team of patient retention, conversion, and advocacy specialists, expanding headcount as the proactive retention layer scales call and SMS volume. Establish a culture of ownership, urgency, empathy, and measurable results from day one.
• Create the QA standards, call review processes, performance scorecards, coaching cadences, and escalation protocols that turn a transitioning team into a high-performing one. Treat every recorded call as a training asset.
• Ensure the team can act as true patient advocates — identifying root causes, resolving issues, and moving patients toward a successful outcome. The bar is consultative, compliant, and commercially accountable. Friction-based “save” tactics that win in subscription SaaS are FTC red meat in healthcare; build switching costs through clinical value, not cancellation difficulty.

Patient Experience & Cross-Functional Coordination

• Ensure all commercial outreach is consultative, compliant, and rooted in helping patients access appropriate care. Every script must be reviewable against HIPAA, TCPA, and FDCPA standards before it is dialed.
• Build a team that can confidently explain next steps, navigate objections, coordinate resolution, and follow issues through to completion. The contact center is the front door to the brand for the patient at the most emotionally charged moment of their relationship with the company — when they’re frustrated, considering cancelling, or about to lapse.
• Surface recurring patient pain points and work cross-functionally with marketing, product, pharmacy, and clinical operations to solve systemic issues rather than just handling symptoms one ticket at a time.

Reporting, KPIs & Continuous Improvement

• Own the daily, weekly, and monthly dashboards for refill completion rate, renewal completion rate, contact rate, conversion rate by flow, revenue recovered, revenue retained, save rate, reactivation rate, speed-to-contact, call productivity, and QA / patient satisfaction.
• Build the testing roadmap to improve performance by service line, patient type, outreach timing, and script variant. Every program should ship with a measurement plan attached, not bolted on after the fact.
• Translate insights into operational changes, product requests, marketing interventions, and patient journey improvements. The retention engine is the company’s clearest signal of where the rest of the business is breaking down — surface that signal upward.

EDUCATION & CERTIFICATION:

• Bachelor’s degree in a related field, or equivalent experience.

FUNCTIONAL COMPETENCIES — SKILLS, KNOWLEDGE & EXPERIENCE:

• 7+ years of experience in contact center, customer retention, inside sales, revenue recovery, or customer success operations at a high-volume subscription or recurring-revenue business — with demonstrable, attributable metric improvement at each stop. Resumes that only describe “supporting” or “contributing to” retention initiatives will not advance.
• Subscription-business operating depth is the primary requirement. Candidates from fintech, insurance, telecom, regulated SaaS, or other high-volume regulated subscription environments are explicitly welcome. Healthcare or telehealth experience is a meaningful bonus but is not a gating requirement; what matters is your ability to operate in a regulated environment and to translate subscription-business retention discipline into a patient-facing context.
• 3+ years leading teams in a regulated environment where compliance scrutiny, audit posture, and consumer-protection rules materially shaped how outreach and saves were designed and run. If that environment was healthcare or telehealth, even better.
• Demonstrated success improving retention, renewal, refill (or equivalent recurring-purchase), save, reactivation, or conversion metrics in an environment where you owned both the strategy and the operational rollout.
• Experience building outbound contact-center workflows from the ground up, including standing up the dialer / CRM / telephony / ticketing stack. This role is a build, not a tune-up. Candidates who have only inherited and managed mature contact centers will be evaluated more skeptically.
• Hands-on experience leading a team through an on-shoring transition (or an analogous BPO repatriation, captive-buildout, or vendor-to-in-house migration) is a meaningful plus.
• Strong, practitioner-level command of funnel management, cohort and segmentation design, queue architecture, dialer logic, call script construction, objection handling, and performance management. You should be able to whiteboard a save flow end-to-end in a screening call.
• Working fluency with CRM, dialer, telephony, ticketing, and customer/patient engagement platforms; opinionated preferences on stack selection are welcome and expected.
• Analytical fluency. You can identify bottlenecks, prioritize initiatives, defend a hypothesis with data, and read a holdout study correctly. You know the difference between platform-reported conversions and incremental conversions.
• Comfort operating cross-functionally with marketing, product, pharmacy, clinical, data, and operations leadership. The role is meaningfully more political than its title suggests.

LEADERSHIP & MANAGEMENT / BEHAVIORAL COMPETENCIES:

• Proven ability to build a team from a small initial headcount into a high-performing operating function — including the QA, coaching, and escalation infrastructure that turns new hires into productive operators within a defined ramp.
• Demonstrated ability to lead through a transition: re-onboarding an inherited team, retraining to new standards, replacing what doesn’t work, retaining what does.
• Ability to balance patient empathy with commercial accountability. You understand that doing right by the patient and protecting margin are not in conflict in this business — they are the same job, executed well.
• Decision-making and communication style suited to reporting directly to a senior operating partner of a PE-backed ownership group. Expect to defend your roadmap monthly and to be measured against a dashboard the operating team reads weekly.

PERSONAL CHARACTERISTICS:

• High integrity. Non-negotiable in any patient-facing function; doubly so given the regulatory environment in healthcare.
• Self-directed and resourceful — you can build from a clean sheet without waiting for someone to hand you a playbook.
• Strong written and verbal communicator who can move fluently between an operating-team review, a clinical operations partner, and a 1:1 with a frontline specialist.
• Entrepreneurial orientation. The role rewards operators who treat the contact center as a P&L, not as a cost center.
• Intellectual honesty and resilience. You will measure your own programs against holdouts; some of them will not work; the right candidate will treat that as information, not failure.
• Bias for action with discipline. Move fast, but measure.

Apply for This Role

Applications for this position are being coordinated by Harry Joiner. To apply, CLICK HERE. Candidates, please be sure to email Harry for a packet of market research and company / competitive intel that will differentiate you in your candidacy. Due to the intensely competitive nature of this search, thorough preparation for these interviews with this proprietary material is strongly recommended.