How Oportun transformed QM and reduced workload by 50% with Cresta
About
Oportun is a mission-driven fintech that puts its 2 million members’ financial goals within reach. With intelligent borrowing, savings, and budgeting capabilities, Oportun empowers members with the confidence to build a better financial future. Since inception, Oportun has provided more than $16.6 billion in responsible and affordable credit, saved its members more than $2.4 billion in interest and fees, and helped its members save an average of more than $1,800 annually. Oportun has been certified as a Community Development Financial Institution (CDFI) since 2009.
Challenges
Due to limited resources and outdated technology, Oportun struggled to identify and address customer needs efficiently. While both BPOs and quality management (QM) teams were tasked with these processes, the legacy approach involved resource-intensive sampling methods and largely untapped data. They knew that QM was capturing highly relevant and useful data – about the needs of customers as well as the needs of their agents – but they didn’t have the resources or technology to extract these insights.
As a result, the team was unable to identify coaching opportunities in real time, see a holistic view of agent performance, and had concern about the potential for risk vulnerabilities. “We were completely inefficient,” Veronica Semler, Vice President of Member Servicing at Oportun, said about this time. The company needed processes and tools that could give them instant visibility into the behaviors that drove performance, and the insights and needs of their customers.
Solution
With the goal of pivoting from a reactive quality assurance (QA) model to a dynamic, agent-centric QM and coaching model in mind, the team assessed tools and platforms across several vendors to understand what could truly align with their vision and meet their needs. Rather than simply automating some pieces of their existing approach, the Oportun team sought a true partner that would help them to create something better and level up across the contact center. “We were looking to challenge the status quo in a productive way. Cresta just automatically rose to the top,” explained Semler.
Supported by Cresta’s customer success team in what Semler describes as a “learning partnership”, Oportun deployed Cresta’s platform. Also involved in the deployment process was implementing a culture change, transitioning from a punitive QA approach, wherein agent performance was judged on a fraction of their calls, to a collaborative coaching and achievement-focused model. Choosing Cresta also allowed for the Oportun team to democratize AI usage across the team, empowering both agents and leadership to access and utilize real-time insights for continuous improvement. Agents have real-time coaching and transcription capabilities, leading to increased confidence, productivity, and autonomy, which has also reduced attrition rates.
By being willing to challenge the status quo and embracing Cresta’s AI-powered solutions, Oportun transformed its contact center operations. Through adopting a growth mindset, they drove significant improvements in efficiency, agent empowerment, and customer experience.
Cresta Conversation Intelligence
With AI-driven coaching plans that happen in real time, leadership is able to identify coaching opportunities and understand specifically what’s happening in individual calls, with individual agents. After implementing Cresta, the QA team shifted from sampling to 100% QA coverage, leading to a 50% reduction in workload across Quality Management.
Cresta Agent Assist
Oportun has improved visibility and coaching, ensuring that agents have access to the information necessary to level up their skills and provide a consistent experience to customers. New agents are also onboarding more rapidly, and attrition has decreased since implementation.