What is the Eddy Effect™?

The Eddy Effect™ is Authenticx's proprietary framework for identifying when a patient or member gets stuck in a recurring, unresolved problem while trying to get help from a healthcare organization. It names a pattern generic sentiment scores miss: the same issue pulling the same person back into contact again and again, without a real resolution. Amy Brown, founder and CEO of Authenticx coined the term to give healthcare leaders language for something they were already living with, they just didn't have a name for it yet.

Picture a canoe trip down a river. A fallen log stops the current cold, and the water has nowhere to go but in circles. That swirl is called an eddy.

Your customers get stuck in eddies too.

The Eddy Effect happens when a customer's expected experience hits an obstacle they can't get past. Instead of moving forward, they're stuck: calling back again and again, no closer to a resolution than the first time they reached out.

Here's what that sounds like:

“I've called and called and called. I need to know when I'm going to get my medication.”

“They said someone would look into it and get back to me. It's been a week, and here I am calling you guys again.”

That's an Eddy. And it's costing your organization more than you think.

How an Eddy Forms

An Eddy can start with a broken process, an agent performance gap, or a product or communication gap, but once it starts, it tends to follow the same pattern, and it gets worse each time it repeats.

1. Feeling: The customer hits a problem and reacts emotionally to it.

“I received the wrong prescription in the mail. Now I'm late taking my medicine.”

2. Seeking Understanding: They try to make sense of what happened, often filling in the gaps with their own theory.

“Did my doctor send the wrong prescription, or did the pharmacy get it wrong?”

3. Continued Confusion: They call support looking for answers. More often than not, they hang up without one.

“The agent said someone would follow up in a few days. It's been a week. I need my prescription now.”

4. Repeat: Without resolution, the cycle starts over, and the customer's frustration compounds each time.

“I've called three times and gotten three different answers. This is a mess, and I'm the one stuck dealing with it.”

That's recurring friction in its purest form: not one bad call, but the same unresolved issue circling back through the contact center again and again.

Why the Eddy Effect Matters

An Eddy isn't just a bad individual experience. It's a repeatable pattern of customer friction that, left unmeasured, quietly drives up contact volume, hurts patient experience and CAHPS or Star Ratings-type metrics, and in healthcare specifically, can hide safety-relevant signals that belong in Safety & Compliance review instead of staying buried in routine complaint volume.

In one analysis of a top-five health insurer's mail-order pharmacy, 30% of contact center calls traced back to Eddies. The main drivers were delivery complaints, IVR confusion, order cancellations, and members running out of medication before their refill arrived. Authenticx identified $792,000 in wasted monthly spend the insurer could save by resolving them.

Most healthcare contact centers can't see this because manual QA typically reviews only a small sample of calls. A handful of spot-checked interactions might catch an agent having a bad day. It won't catch a pattern that only shows up when you look across thousands of conversations at once. That's why Eddies usually go undetected until they've already cost the organization money, trust, or both.

How to Spot an Eddy Before It Spirals

An Eddy leaves a trail before it becomes a crisis: repeat contacts about the same unresolved issue, language that escalates from confusion to frustration to anger across those repeat contacts, and the same root cause showing up across multiple channels, a call, then a chat, then a callback request, all about the same thing.

The fix isn't more agents fielding repeat contacts. It's catching the disruption at the source, and that requires seeing the full recurring friction pattern across 100% of interactions, not a sample. A single call center agent has no way to know that the same billing confusion they just handled is the fourteenth version of it this week. An Eddy Effect score, calculated across every conversation rather than a subset of them, does.

How Authenticx Measures and Resolves the Eddy Effect

Authenticx analyzes 100% of healthcare contact center interactions, not a sample, and assigns a quantifiable Eddy Effect score to surface these patterns automatically instead of waiting for someone to notice them by hand. That scoring lives inside Business Insights, where trends across call volume, complaint themes, and repeat-contact patterns become visible at the level leaders actually need to act on them.

Because an Eddy score is only as useful as it is trustworthy, every model behind it is paired with on-shore, human-reviewed AI, a review layer built to answer the question healthcare leaders ask before they'll act on any AI-generated score: how do you know this is accurate.

Go deeper on the Eddy Effect: For the full methodology behind the score, see measuring Eddy Effect impact.

See the Eddy Effect in Action

Schedule a demo to see how Authenticx flags Eddy Effect friction before it costs you.