Industry:
Consumer Finance
Business Unit:
Sales/Originations,
Use Case:
Quality management,
Real-time agent guidance,
Performance coaching,
Channel:
Voice
Key Objectives:
Move from sample-based QA to 100% interaction coverage,
Give supervisors real-time visibility into the behaviors that drive outcomes,
Equip agents with in-the-moment guidance through every conversation,
Build a coaching culture focused on growth, not "gotchas",
Products:
How Oportun moved from sample-based QA to 100% interaction monitoring with Cresta
How Oportun moved from sample-based QA to 100% interaction monitoring with Cresta
About Oportun
Oportun is a financial services company built on a mission: to make affordable financial services accessible to people who need them most. Headquartered in California and serving millions of members across the United States, Oportun offers personal loans, credit cards, and savings tools designed for people who are often overlooked by traditional banks.
Behind that mission is a customer experience operation that touches the most important moments in a member's journey, from the first sales conversation to ongoing servicing. As Oportun has grown, the team has continued to invest in technology that helps agents deliver consistent, high-quality experiences at scale, while giving leadership the visibility they need to keep improving.
Featured in this story:
- Ryan Helwig, Chief Operating Officer, Oportun
- Ritika Mathur, Sr. Director, Strategy and Oversight, Oportun
- Ileana Quintero, Operations Director, Oportun
- Suyog Singh, VP, Product and Strategy, Oportun
The challenge: A sample-based view of a fast-moving business
When Ryan Helwig joined Oportun, the team was approaching quality assurance the way most contact centers do: manually sampling a small percentage of calls, scoring them against a checklist, and using the results to coach agents weeks after the conversations actually happened.
"We looked at quality assurance in a very sample-based methodology," Ryan said. "So purely focused on, are we complying with our needs or not?"
That approach had two real problems. The first was scope. Sampling means most calls go unseen, leaving blind spots in both performance and risk. The second was speed; by the time a manager pulled a call, scored it, and got feedback to the agent, the moment to actually change behavior had passed.
For agents on the front line, the experience felt scattered. "Within the sales environment, there are so many things agents need to remember on a call," said Ileana Quintero. "All those elements can be sometimes hard to remember, sometimes hard to keep present in every single conversation."
The result was variability. Every sales interaction differed slightly depending on who was handling it. Oportun's leadership saw an opportunity to step back and reimagine what quality and coaching could look like.
The solution
Oportun partnered with Cresta to rebuild quality management and coaching from the ground up, with three connected capabilities working in tandem:
- AI-powered quality management across 100% of conversations, replacing manual sampling with a complete, data-driven view of every interaction.
- Real-time agent guidance through hints and call flows surfaced in the moment, so agents have an "on-the-spot coach" walking them through every conversation.
- Behavioral coaching that helps supervisors focus on the specific actions that drive outcomes, instead of debating scores from a small sample.
"We believe that Cresta is very invested in our success, wants to understand our business, and really make sure that they are tailoring the models to what works best," Ryan said.
That partnership shaped the rollout. "It was a journey," Ritika Mathur said, "but we were not alone in that journey. Cresta was with us every step of the way."
Why Cresta
For Oportun, the difference came down to two things: the technology, and the willingness of the team behind it to co-design something tailored to Oportun's business. Cresta wasn't a vendor selling a product, but a partner building a foundation Oportun could grow into, starting with sales and extending into other parts of the business over time.
What's next: Extending the AI foundation into Collections
The transformation in sales is the first chapter of a longer strategic journey. Oportun is now extending the same AI foundation into collections, applying Agent Assist, Insights, and Cresta Coach to support millions of collections conversations every year. The goal is the same one that's driven the work in sales from day one: better outcomes for members, and better performance for the business.
For Oportun, Cresta isn't just a vendor. It's a learning partner that's helped reshape how the team operates.
"To me, it changes the game," Ryan said. "It makes my team members feel like I can win in those moments of truth."
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Results
Cresta Quality Management
From sampling to 100% interaction monitoring. Oportun replaced its manual, sample-based QA process with full-coverage AI monitoring. Every single conversation now contributes to coaching and risk visibility, not just the small subset that used to make it into review.
"Moving from sampling to 100% interaction monitoring was a big change. It's no longer anecdotal. It's more data-driven, it's more data-backed."
Cresta Insights
Real-time visibility into the behaviors that drive performance. With 100% of conversations now flowing through Cresta, the question for Oportun's leadership shifted from "what do we know?" to "where do we focus?" Cresta Insights gives supervisors the signal to act on, surfacing the highest-impact coaching opportunities across the team in real time.
"Our coaches, our supervisors, are seeing that real time. It's not lagged by two to three weeks. That data enables us to prioritize the area of highest impact and hone into that."
Cresta Agent Assist
An in-the-moment coach for every agent, on every call. Sales conversations at Oportun involve dozens of steps, disclosures, and product details, all of which agents historically had to keep in their heads. Cresta Agent Assist takes that mental burden off the team by surfacing the right action at the right moment, freeing agents to focus on the member instead of the checklist.
"Through Cresta, we were giving agents live hints so that they could follow that call flow. It's almost like we had an on-the-spot coach who was looking over to how agents were performing and telling them in real time what to do next."
Cresta Coach
Coaching focused on behaviors that drive performance. With behaviors visible across 100% of calls, supervisors moved from debating scores to developing agents. Coaching conversations now focus on what an agent did well and how to do it again, instead of pointing out misses from a tiny sample.
"We were able to really move away from the 'gotcha' mentality into one of, 'Hey, you did this really, really well, and the next time you have this opportunity, here's how you can capitalize on that.' That was a moment of truth for us."
Material business impact
Tighter performance separation, real profit & loss gains. As coaching shifted to the behaviors that actually drive outcomes, the gap between top performers and the rest of the team started to close, and the business saw the difference on the bottom line.
"We started to see separation in our pull-through rates, and those separations really lead to some beneficial P&L gains for the business. And if I can get quartile two and three to perform more like quartile one, the dollars are material for the business."
