How Achieve generated 3x ROI and cut after-call work by 75% with Cresta

About Achieve

Achieve is a digital personal finance company on a mission to help everyday Americans get out of debt and move forward financially. Through programs that combine personal loans, debt resolution, and home equity solutions, Achieve serves clients who are often facing some of the most difficult financial moments of their lives.

"Our primary goal is to help struggling Americans strive financially," said Brandon Peterson, SVP, Client Experience & Operations.

Customer experience sits at the heart of that mission. Every conversation is a chance to keep a client engaged in a program that, if completed, can change the trajectory of their financial life.

The challenge: Consistency is what drives retention

Achieve's debt resolution program is a long-term commitment. Clients who stick with it see real results, but the path isn't easy.

"Client success in the program is really determined very early," Brandon said. "This program that we have is a hardship program. Retention in the program is a primary concern. One of those things that drives retention is consistency."

That put a specific kind of pressure on the frontline delivering customer experience. Every agent needed to deliver the same high-quality experience on every call, in moments where the stakes for the client were personal and real. Achieve needed more than activity monitoring; they needed to see and hear what was actually happening in those conversations, and have a way to coach toward the specific behaviors that helped clients stay on track.

The solution

Achieve deployed Cresta to bring AI-powered intelligence to every client conversation, and to give the leadership team a connected system for coaching the behaviors that matter most. The deployment combined:

• Real-time agent guidance that supports agents through complex conversations with clients in difficult financial situations.
• Auto-summarization that eliminates the bulk of manual after-call work, letting agents move from one client to the next without sacrificing the quality of notes.
• A behavior-based Coaching Hub that aligns the entire leadership team around the same focus areas, gives agents visibility into their own performance, and ties coaching directly to business outcomes.

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"What Cresta has given us isn't just the activity monitoring, but now we get to hear and see what's really being said on the calls," Brandon said.

Why Cresta

For Achieve, the value of Cresta is in how it turns coaching into a system. As a behaviors-based organization, Achieve needed a platform that could measure individual performance, support consistent coaching across the leadership team, and connect those coaching efforts directly to results.

"We are a behaviors-based group, which really ties well into how the Coaching Hub is designed," Brandon said. "It allows us to measure each individual's performance. We can create plans, we can follow up on those plans, they can see their own performance, and the Coaching Hub allows us, as a leadership team, to be consistent in our coaching, to give really clear focus areas. We actually drive business outcomes with that tool."

What's next: AI that helps agents, not replaces them

Behind every productivity metric is a person on the other end of a headset, and Brandon's team knew from the start that rolling out AI would raise real concerns on the frontline.

"As we lean into AI, there was always concern for those impacted on the frontline of potentially losing their jobs," Brandon said. "As we push for adoption, one of the things that we had to show was the value it brought in terms of helping them with their jobs instead of replacing their jobs."

📊 The data backs Brandon up. 300 CX leaders weighed in on how AI is reshaping the workforce. The verdict: AI isn't replacing CX work. It's redistributing it, and making the people inside the org better at what they do. Read Cresta's 2026 CX Workforce Report →

That principle has shaped how Achieve deploys Cresta. The tools help agents move faster, handle complex conversations with more confidence, and spend less time on the parts of the job that drain them. The result is customer experience where AI is making the humans in it better at what they do.

"There is no doubt that AI takes CX in a completely different direction," Brandon said.

For Achieve, that direction is already paying off, both in measurable returns and in the kind of client experience that keeps people moving forward.