Cut loading an outbound call list from seven days of hand-keying to under five minutes, and completed calls rose from about 300 to nearly 3,500.
A healthcare services company made outbound customer-satisfaction calls for its clients. Each client sent a list of about 5,000 calls, and six people keyed every record into the triage information system by hand before the calling could start.
Switch between keying and importing
A week of hours against five minutes
Before: keying the list took 7 days, shown as all 168 squares of a week, one square per hour.
Drawn to scale: each square is 1 hour, 24 to a row, so the seven days are 168 squares. Under 5 minutes is drawn at its upper bound, 5 of the hour's 60 minutes.
| Value | Method | Recorded | Scope |
|---|---|---|---|
| 7 days to under 5 minutes | Recalled from the work in 2007 to 2010 and written down on the date shown: six people keying one list by hand, against an import loading the file the client sent | 2026-10-01 | One outbound customer-satisfaction list of about 5,000 calls |
| about 300 to nearly 3,500 calls completed | Recalled, as above: completed calls out of the roughly 5,000 listed, before and after the six people who had keyed the list moved to calling full time; one of them became the outbound manager | 2026-10-01 | The same list size, with the same six people |
Dates are when each figure was recorded for this site; the work itself is dated in the setting above.
What this does not prove
The seven days was six people keying by hand, not a technical limit. The call counts are approximate: recalled, not taken from an exported report. The import freed the time; the same six people made the extra calls. Records matched what the client sent because nobody retyped them.