Rent, the beloved musical that turns 30 this year, built its story around one central truth: Time is precious. That same urgency drives today’s fintech consumers who care less about bohemian soul-searching and more about fast, frictionless, mobile experiences that resolve their issues without the drama.

The nature of our client’s customer support operations is highly cyclical and surge-driven. Because its mobile-first platform facilitates digital payments between tenants and landlords, most interactions occur at the beginning of the month, when rent is typically due. That means the contact center is inundated by a flurry of payment and account inquiries via voice and email during the first week of each month.

Challenge

With customer support demand compressed into one week, when all tenants are paying rent simultaneously, the company needed a CX partner that could flex up during that seven-day window, maintain high quality, and ramp back down following “rent week,” when the urgency, volume, and nature of inquiries changes considerably.

Our client lacked its own training infrastructure. Simply staffing up during the monthly surge period was not a practical option from a scaling or budget standpoint. Any new hire, process change, or product update depended entirely on the client’s outsourcing partner.

Systemic policy issues that fell outside the team’s control, such as a tenant erroneously directed to a property management firm to resolve their issue, eroded customer satisfaction. Add to this all the issues that trigger financial anxiety for residents who want to pay their rent: Autopay versus manual payment conflicts, balance display errors, late fees. Slow resolution created frustration and reduced trust in the platform.

Our client’s limited tech stack lacked omnichannel, AI, and automation functionality. 

Our solution

TTEC devised a dynamic scheduling system for our client to maximize efficiency without increasing headcount. Limiting paid-time-off requests to nonsurge weeks, for example, ensured our well-trained team was available to manage elevated demand during peak periods. Our dynamic channel routing assigned associates to voice and email channels as needed in real time, driven by volume signals.

We took on full training ownership. Our team lead served as trainer, quality assurance (QA) evaluator, and calibration lead, providing a complete knowledge management system that did not depend on client resources.

Real-time communications, though daily Slack updates, weekly business reviews, and QA calibration sessions provided the client full visibility into operations. This permitted us to anticipate issues that could arise and resolve them before they escalated into bigger problems.

Our team leads manually reviewed all dissatisfied (DSAT) tickets weekly to determine which issues involved associates versus those driven by factors outside our control. Understanding where skills gaps might exist enabled us to personalize and target training to individuals who needed it, rather than subject the entire team to generic training that may provide little or no benefit.

Additionally, TTEC performed a fraud risk assessment and devised workflows for all payment-sensitive tasks.

Key differentiators TTEC brought forward: A deep understanding of channel performance and ability to optimize the mix between phone and email interactions. Customer surveys played a critical role in guiding operational improvements, identifying opportunities, and continuously enhancing overall performance.

Results

Our team in the Philippines consistently delivered quality scores that met or exceeded the 90% target.

After achieving the 80% CSAT goal for the voice channel, week after week, our client raised the target to 85% CSAT in just four months’ time — and we continually met and outperformed on that KPI.

SLA attainment was 80% across both voice and email channels.

This success story illustrates how the right CX partner can help clients manage the cyclical surge of customer support demand via a flexible, high-performing CX operation. Leveraging dynamic scheduling, taking full ownership of training, and making proactive recommendations enabled our team to consistently meet and exceed key performance metrics while positioning our client for future growth.