Medtronic

Medtronic supported patients and clinicians across 10 business units and 63 call centers with more than 2,000 agents, but legacy keypad IVR drove misroutes, long wait times, and inconsistent experiences. The burden was especially acute in cardiovascular support, where callers needed timely help with pacemakers, defibrillators, and other critical devices. Agents spent excessive time on basic troubleshooting and manual lookups instead of complex cases, while regulated healthcare requirements demanded strong security and governance.

Medtronic modernized voice and digital support with Teneo, evolving from deterministic virtual assistants (first live in 2019) to conversational IVR and agentic AI. A 2022 cardiovascular pilot routed patients, clinicians, and sales callers to the right expertise, integrated Five9 for callbacks and SMS, and later added RAG on approved content with citation-backed guidance for device alarms. Deployments expanded through 2023–2025 with HIPAA/PCI-compliant guardrails, PII scrubbing, SSO, multi-agent handoffs, and workflow agents such as PagerRep for field reps.

Medtronic reported $6M in cost savings in 2022 and 36,000 agent hours saved, with cost per contact in the Cardiovascular Group falling substantially. Wait time dropped 37%, misrouted calls fell significantly, abandonment improved 6.7 points, and service level rose 18 points. Customer satisfaction increased meaningfully, and the program handled a substantial volume of voice IVA sessions by June 2023 across 13 live Teneo agents supporting 60+ contact centers.

• Combining deterministic flows, LLMs, and tools with guardrails enabled scalable, compliant automation across regulated medical device support.
• RAG on approved content with transparent citations and post-processing guardrails was critical for trustworthy troubleshooting on high-stakes device issues.
• Success in the cardiovascular contact center pilot drove adoption across other Medtronic business units and contact centers.