Customer Success Stories: How Christian Healthcare Ministries is Improving Member Experience with AI

Across the healthcare industry, patient experience is becoming as important to organizations as clinical outcomes — and that holds true even for a ministry that isn’t a traditional insurer. For more than 40 years, Christian Healthcare Ministries (CHM) has helped families share the cost of medical bills through faith-based health cost sharing — not insurance, but a ministry built on trust. That trust is tested every day in CHM’s healthcare contact center, where members call in during some of the hardest moments of their lives: a diagnosis, a hospital bill, a new baby on the way. 

So when CHM found itself preparing for a tenfold increase in membership, the stakes went well beyond call volume. As Wayne Pierce, CCaS Manager at CHM and the Five9 2025 Most Trusted Expert New Era of CX Award winner, explained during our Winner Spotlight webinar: “The systems we had, or the lack of systems that we had, were maxed out. There was nothing more that we could get out of them.”  

Members were met with a 10-option phone menu that routed too many callers into a “0 for operator” queue, and agents were buried in manual work with no capacity left for the growth ahead. Hiring more agents wasn’t sustainable. CHM needed a fundamentally different foundation. 

Choosing a guide for the next chapter  

Pierce came to CHM as a business analyst and consultant with contact center experience on both the customer and vendor side. After months spent diagnosing exactly where the organization was struggling, he shortlisted three potential platforms and brought in Waterfield Tech, a contact center integration partner he’d worked with for years, to independently vet the options. Waterfield landed on the same three solutions without knowing CHM’s list — and together, they converged on Five9 and its healthcare solutions, built for organizations navigating exactly this kind of transformation. 

“We felt Five9 gave us everything we needed and then some, and at Five9, we could never outgrow them, which was also a key component of this,” Pierce said. 

Waterfield’s day-to-day implementation expertise, paired with the Five9 Intelligent CX Platform, gave CHM both the technology and the guidance to put it to work correctly the first time. 

From 10-option menus to knowing members by name  

The transformation showed up immediately in how calls were handled. Instead of routing every caller through a long, confusing menu, Five9 gave CHM’s team the ability to identify members and their status before agents said a word. “So instead of having long menus, when members called in, we knew who they were, and not only that, we knew their status with Christian Healthcare Ministries,” Pierce explained. A member in the middle of a claim, or expecting a baby, could be connected straight to the right specialist — no menu, no guesswork. It’s a small shift with an outsized effect on patient experience: members reach the right person without repeating themselves or waiting in a queue. 

The results were significant: 

As Pierce put it, “Our customers are saying, ‘I don’t know what you’re doing, but we’re getting answered right away...this is great.’” 

That same automation opened the door to outreach CHM couldn’t do before. The team now places outbound welcome calls to every new member and offers prayer calls to those navigating difficult health journeys. “That has just been a phenomenal thing,” Pierce said. “Our members just love this. They feel loved.” It’s a reminder that for CHM’s healthcare contact center, efficiency was never really the point — it was always about restoring capacity for ministry. 

What’s next: analytics, AI and always-on service 

CHM isn’t stopping at inbound and outbound calling. The team is bringing SMS into the Five9 platform, rolling out chat in the coming months and building an analytics practice to get a clearer picture of the member experience. Looking further ahead, Pierce is eyeing AI-powered self-service to extend support beyond CHM’s current 8 am-6 pm hours, plus Five9 AI Agent Assist to help guide agents in real time.  

“You know your child never gets sick or has an emergency neatly between the hours of 8 am and 6 pm,” Pierce said. “With Five9 automation, we can look at how we offer services 24/7.” 

For CX leaders weighing a similar transformation, Pierce’s advice is direct: don’t be afraid of the technology, and don’t go it alone. “Invest either internally or get professionals to come in that know contact center,” he said, pointing to the combination of a strong platform and an experienced partner as what made CHM’s transition work the first time.