For fast-growing fintechs where trust is the product, one scathing customer review on a popular digital platform can unravel in hours what took years to build. Customers don’t just leave. They warn everyone they know.

Here’s how a champion-challenger pilot rocketed a Brazilian company with a “bad Reclame Aqui,” in local parlance, to a triumphant customer rating of 9 out of 10 — in just eight months’ time.

Challenge

Our client, a U.S. company that extends credit to consumers who are unbanked or don’t qualify for traditional loans, entered the Brazil market with a CX model that didn’t keep pace with its growth trajectory. Customer satisfaction, response rates, and other performance metrics failed to meet targets.

The inability to scale quickly created coverage gaps and eroded quality of the customer experience. New lines of business were growing, including card products, back-office review, direct-to-consumer (D2C), B2C, and B2B, without the support needed.

The fintech’s score on Brazil’s Reclaim Aqui customer reviews platform was a dismal 3 on a 1-to-10 scale. In this market, consumers rely on Reclame Aqui the way U.S. consumers depend on Google Reviews and Trustpilot. In Brazil, the reviews platform has outsized cultural influence because it’s part of a broader dispute resolution and consumer rights ecosystem.

Our client’s preference for bot-led contact handling meant human interactions were disproportionately complex, requiring associates with strong judgment and escalation capability, not just script-followers. However, its contact center associates had limited skills and performed like gig workers from a staffing agency rather than as an engaged team with the cohesion, insights, and strategic vision to solve complex issues as true brand ambassadors.

Switching from an existing CX provider to a new one, however, was a dicey proposition. Migrating processes, data, and workflows across multiple lines of business risked disruption, errors, and costly downtime — any one of which could cascade into broader operational and customer-facing failures.

TTEC was brought in for a champion-challenger pilot. The objective: de-risk decision-making by running the incumbent provider’s solution against a new contender (TTEC) simultaneously to compare and validate performance with real data before committing to any change.

Our Solution

Agility was the core operating principle of TTEC’s approach for improving customer satisfaction, response rates, and scalability. Our digital-first strategy had broad scope spanning customer support, smartphone seller networks, back-office review, card products, D2C, and brand management.

• Brand management: Recognizing the influence of Reclame Aqui on purchasing behavior, TTEC built a dedicated specialist team to monitor, engage, and swiftly resolve customer complaints on the platform.
• Speed-to-launch: When the client introduced a new card product that was strategically key for growth, TTEC assembled a team ready for training in one week’s time.
• Process improvement: TTEC developed weekly business reports to share observations about customer behavior. We performed analysis and proposed process changes to take advantage of new opportunities. Team leads and front-line associates contributed input to refine processes where they saw friction and inefficiency.
• Proximity prerogative: With TTEC’s offices located just blocks from the company, our client visited our site frequently to observe how the team was performing, ask questions, and receive on-demand analysis on any matter of interest.

Our teams delivered omnichannel CX (chat, WhatsApp, voice) across eight lines of business. TTEC’s multichat model enabled associates to deftly manage up to five separate customer chats simultaneously. Our teams engaged with prospective customers, facilitated enrollment, resolved card-related inquiries, and payment issues.

We rapidly scaled up to meet the demands of growth, from 15 associates to 125 in 18 months, maintaining quality levels.

By creating a Six Sigma project, a structured, data-driven initiative to improve process and quality, and leveraging the expertise of our Learning and Performance practice, TTEC identified new processes, training, and workflows to elevate CX.

Results

Our client’s customer satisfaction score on Reclame Aqui rose from 3 to 9 (out of a possible 10) in just eight months’ time. As a result, it was awarded the coveted Certificado RA 1000 badge, comparable to an A+ rating from the Better Business Bureau in the United States.

Within the first month of operation, KPI performance outpaced the incumbent provider, prompting the company to move all lines of business to TTEC as its exclusive partner. We started with workers on-site, pivoted to a hybrid model, and within two years transitioned to 100% Remote CX.

Average handle time (AHT) was reduced, exceeding the client’s goal by 8%.

TTEC entered the pilot as the challenger and left as the fintech’s partner of choice. By outperforming its predecessor on every KPI that mattered — speed, quality, and customer experience — TTEC didn’t just win the business. We earned it.