Doubling agent talk time for a high-volume lender

A fast-growing Buy Now Pay Later (BNPL) lender needed a cloud contact center platform for financial services that could scale collections calling without the downtime, license caps, and rigid infrastructure of its previous setup. Here’s how ClearTouch helped nearly double average agent talk time in weeks.

The Client

The customer is a fast-growing financial services company offering Buy Now Pay Later (BNPL) credit to retail and e-commerce customers, with credit lines of up to INR 99,000 and roughly INR 600 crores disbursed in a single year. Beyond BNPL, the company offers a range of loan products to existing customers based on their payment history and needs.

To manage repayments, the company runs a collections operation of about 175 agents spread across four cities: Chennai, Bangalore, Mumbai, and Delhi. As the loan book grew, the company needed financial services customer experience solutions that could keep pace with rising call volumes without constant infrastructure firefighting.

For a lender operating at this scale, every hour an agent isn’t on the phone is a collections opportunity lost.

The Challenge

The company’s collections model depends on getting agents on the phone with customers who miss an EMI after in-app reminders go unanswered. But the team’s existing contact center platform was holding that process back.

The biggest constraint was agent talk time: despite their best efforts, agents were capped at a maximum of 2.5 hours of talk time a day, and the company wanted to push that past 3 hours without adding headcount. Other requirements included:

1. Skill-based call routing to lift contact center agent productivity.
2. Integration with their in-house CRM.
3. The flexibility to move agents internally, and to upsize or downsize the team quickly.
4. Intelligent auto-pacing based on real-time agent availability.

The underlying infrastructure made all of this difficult. Dashboards were siloed by product with no unified

view, each server was capped at 150 agent licenses, the company depended on a single Digital SIP provider with no redundancy, and only 90 channels were available for 30 agents in Chennai, well short of what predictive dialing needs to keep a team busy. Under peak load, the platform would freeze for 30 to 45 minutes at a stretch.

The Solution

The company implemented the ClearTouch Operator platform as its financial services call center software, starting with its Chennai collections team.

The company completed integration with the in-house CRM within a day, importing all contacts in minutes. Skill-based routing, layered with location- and time-based routing, was switched on immediately to route the right calls to the right agents.

Drawing on experience running hundreds of collections call centers worldwide, ClearTouch’s team knew it typically takes around 15 dialed calls to land one connected call. For a 30-agent team, that meant provisioning 450 channels at peak, five times the 90 channels the company had before, so agents were never left waiting. Channels scale seamlessly with no manual effort, and dynamic DID numbers help calls avoid spam flags and depressed answer rates.

A predictive dialer automatically adjusts pacing based on list quality and agent availability to minimize idle time, while the platform tracks the full set of metrics the company needed for contact center performance management: Average Handling Time, Average Talk Time, Average Wait Time, and Utilization rate, all visible to every team that needs them.

The result freed agents to spend more of each shift in live conversations instead of waiting on calls to connect.

Benefits

The new platform reshaped both agent performance and operational resilience:

1. Higher agent productivity – Average talk time rose well beyond the 3-hour target, with some agents reaching up to 6 hours in a day.
2. Unified agent desktop – A single dashboard gives agents a complete view of customer information, enabling personalized, consistent conversations across multiple products.
3. Omnichannel customer service – Support for outbound, inbound, and blended dialing, plus predictive, preview, and manual dialing with IVR.
4. Contact center reporting – Configurable, real-time reports broken down by agent, center, product, and process, alongside historical trends.
5. Enterprise-grade compliance – Cloud security aligned with PCI-DSS, HIPAA, SSAE-16, DOT/TRAI, FedRamp, FDCPA, and Reg-F, with built-in redundancy and high availability.
6. Pay-per-use economics – No contract, no monthly minimums, and no maintenance fees, so the platform scales with call volume rather than against it.

Results & Outcomes

The rollout delivered a step change in what the collections team could do with the same headcount:

1. Average agent talk time nearly doubled, from 2.5 hours to 4.5 hours, with peak performers reaching 6 hours.
2. Channel capacity increased 5x for the same team size, from 90 to 450 channels for 30 agents.
3. CRM integration completed in a single day, with contacts imported within minutes.
4. Full visibility into AHT, ATT, AWT, and Utilization rate across every resource, replacing fragmented, product-only dashboards.
5. A platform built to extend beyond the pilot site to Bangalore, Mumbai, and Delhi, and beyond collections into sales teams cross-selling personal and consumer loans.

By solving contact center agent productivity at the infrastructure level, the company built a foundation it could extend across every team and location handling customer calls.

Together, these changes turned a capacity-constrained operation into one with headroom to grow.