How Aqua Finance increased dollars collected per hour by 61% and cut after-call work in half with Cresta

About Aqua Finance

Aqua Finance provides consumers with financing for a wide range of products, including home improvement loans, water treatment systems, and power recreational vehicles. With a portfolio that now sits just under $7 billion, Aqua has built its growth on giving consumers of all credit profiles access to flexible financing, and on a servicing operation built to scale with that growth.

Dan Greer, SVP of Servicing Operations at Aqua, leads the contact center teams responsible for that experience across collections, customer care, and more, including a mix of onshore, offshore, and bilingual agents.

The challenge

Aqua Finance was growing fast, and the contact center needed to keep up without ballooning in cost.

"We've made a ton of progress rolling out new technologies so that we can continue to add loans to the books without adding heads to service them," Dan said.

But scaling efficiently isn't just a headcount question. It's a consistency question: every interaction needed to feel personal, accurate, and on-brand, whether it was being handled by a tenured collector or a new offshore hire working in their second language.

A few specific challenges stood out:

• Inconsistent agent performance. Without real-time guidance, every conversation looked a little different depending on who was on the line.
• Time-consuming after-call work. Wrap time on collections calls pulled agents away from the next customer and capped the team's capacity.
• Manual, sample-based coaching. Managers couldn't realistically review enough calls to know where their team's real gaps were.
• Language barriers for bilingual and offshore agents. Translation slowed down conversations and pulled agents' focus away from the customer.

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Dan was looking for a platform that could lift every agent, on every call, without bolting more work onto already busy managers.

The solution

After evaluating the market, Dan and his team chose Cresta. What stood out wasn't just the technology, but the willingness of the team behind it to build to Aqua's specific needs.

"Cresta is hands down the best vendor team that I've worked with," Dan said. "Most of the time I get told no, we can't do this. Cresta has really been the only company that we've worked with who has figured out a way to make what I'm asking for come to life."

Aqua rolled out the Cresta platform across servicing, with a particular focus on collections. The deployment combined:

• Real-time agent guidance. Cresta surfaces hints and tips to agents in the moment, with simple visual acknowledgments when agents take the right action. "When they perform the activity, they get a nice little check mark and it reminds them that they've done it," Dan said. "Happier agents are more successful."
• Auto-summarization. Cresta automatically generates call summaries, eliminating the bulk of manual wrap work. "It's not just the after-call work time that's the benefit," Dan said. "It really is that it allows agents to focus on the customers."
• Live transcription and translation. For bilingual and offshore agents, Cresta puts a live transcript on the screen and translates in real time, letting agents focus on the customer instead of the language.
• AI-powered coaching across 100% of calls. Cresta listens to every call, scores against the behaviors Aqua cares about, identifies gaps, and builds automated coaching plans for managers and agents to work from together.

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"Cresta listens to 100% of the phone calls. It's looking at all the different behaviors that we specifically care about. It's identifying where the gaps are. It's telling the managers what they need to focus on, and it's providing them with a coaching plan that's automatic and something that the agents then can monitor themselves and track their performance," Dan said.