Keeping 500+ agents productive from home in 48 hours

When COVID-19 forced a large online lending marketplace to move its entire contact center home overnight, its on-premises platform couldn’t keep up. Here’s how fintech contact center software helped move 500+ agents to a fully remote, cloud-hosted setup in just 48 hours, without a single day of lost service.

The Client

The customer is one of the largest online marketplaces for instant, custom rate quotes on loans and credit cards, letting people shop for personal, vehicle, home, and education loans, along with deposits and cards, in one place. It works with multiple banks to surface the best available offers, and its agents qualify incoming leads before routing them to the right bank representative to close the loop.

Before the pandemic, the company ran its contact center from a single physical location using an on-premises platform, a setup that worked well until its agents could no longer come into the office.

The Challenge

In March 2020, as soon as COVID-19 was declared a pandemic, the company had to move its 500+ agents home almost overnight. Its incumbent contact center platform supported only on-premises deployments, and the business couldn’t continue operating without work-from-home contact center software to replace it.

The company was already familiar with cloud contact center options and knew what it needed from one:

1. High levels of data security, the kind expected from fintech compliance software.
2. The ability to monitor agent performance and productivity.
3. In-depth, customizable reporting with dashboard views for different divisions and employee categories, plus training and support to bring agents up to speed quickly.

The bigger obstacle was connectivity. Agents were spread across the city, and many had low-bandwidth home internet, resulting in poor call quality: jitter, delays, and choppy voice. Upgrading connectivity at hundreds of individual homes during a lockdown was both time-consuming and prohibitively expensive. The company was stuck and needed a fintech contact center software provider that could work around the problem instead of waiting it out.

The Solution

ClearTouch demonstrated its remote contact center solutions, and after evaluation, the company adopted the platform as its fintech call center software of choice, satisfied that it met both the stated requirements and the needs the company hadn’t yet put into words.

The core of the fix was ClearTouch’s cloud telephony solutions: a connected-calling method for telephony over regular PSTN lines. Instead of relying on each agent’s home broadband, agents logged into the ClearTouch portal and dialed a designated access number from any mobile or landline. The cloud platform received the web request, dialed the uploaded leads, and connected the call over the phone network instead of the public internet, thereby sidestepping the bandwidth problem entirely.

A two-leg calling method tied everything together: when an agent clicked a number to call, an API request carrying the agent’s phone number, the customer’s number, and a transaction ID went to ClearTouch, which dialed the agent on one leg and the customer on the other, then sent the call result back to the company’s CRM in real time. All the usual voice controls, like manual dialing, call hold, call transfer, intercom, voicemail, queue view, and call recording, worked directly from the portal.

ClearTouch implemented this platform for all 500+ agents in 48 hours, and the team was operational immediately.

Benefits

The platform gave the company a way to operationalize remote work without compromising on performance:

1. Work-from-home ready: Agents could use any device, like mobile, tablet, laptop, or desktop, thanks to a device-agnostic, cross-browser interface, letting top performers get back on calls immediately.
2. Bandwidth-independent calling: Connected-method telephony over PSTN removed the dependency on stable home internet, solving the core problem that had stalled the company’s remote transition.
3. Higher fintech agent productivity: Automated Intelligent Voice Messaging pre-qualifies leads from the company’s website and feeds them directly into the cloud contact center platform, making agents measurably more productive.
4. Better contact center reporting: In-depth, easy-to-read reports and dashboards support time-sensitive decisions and give every user role the view it needs.
5. Round-the-clock support: 24×7 support covered both training and day-to-day calling needs during the transition.
6. Scalability and cost savings: The platform scales up or down without touching the underlying infrastructure, at a fraction of the cost of the company’s previous on-premises and calling plans.

Results & Outcomes

The rollout turned a stalled, office-bound operation into a fully remote one almost overnight:

1. 500+ agents moved to a cloud contact center software environment in 48 hours, with immediate operational readiness.
2. Poor call quality caused by low-bandwidth home internet was eliminated through PSTN-based connected calling.
3. Zero business continuity loss during one of the most disruptive events the industry had faced.
4. Zero customer churn across five years of working with ClearTouch, reflecting sustained platform reliability.
5. Meaningful cost savings compared to the company’s prior on-premises infrastructure and calling plans.

These outcomes gave the company a template it could keep using: it can now ramp remote seats up or down without ever worrying about the type of internet connection an agent has at home.