58%
average containment rate across AI Agents
50%
reduction in after-call work (ACW)
Industry:
Financial Services
Business Unit:
Customer Service,
Loan Origination,
Payment Solutions (Collections),
Use Case:
Collections,
Customer Care,
Channel:
Voice & Chat
Key Objectives:
Retention,
Revenue,
AHT,
QM,
Products:
Propel Holdings (TSX: PRL) Powers Customer-Centric Growth with Cresta
How a fast-growing financial technology company is scaling smarter with AI to enhance customer experiences, empower agents, and support long-term growth
About Propel Holdings
Propel Holdings (TSX: PRL) is on a mission to expand access to credit with transparency, speed, and customer care. With multiple lending brands and teams across Customer Service, Loan Origination, and Payment Solutions, Propel has seen rapid growth since going public in 2021. As customer demand increases, the company continues to invest in technology to empower their people and efficiently scale operations.
Challenges
Propel’s rapid growth brought a familiar challenge: how to maintain exceptional service without adding headcount at the same rate. Contact center leaders needed to manage rising volume and complexity across voice and chat while maintaining quality, improving resolution rates, and gaining better visibility into performance. In the regulated financial services market, collections added complexity, requiring deeper insight into customer profiles, delinquency patterns, and macroeconomic trends to improve early-stage outcomes.
Leaders saw opportunities to automate routine interactions but knew it had to be done in a way that enhanced the customer experience and supported agents. At the time, agents were spending significant effort on manual documentation, navigating systems, and searching for information — time that could be better spent with customers. Having already embraced AI in underwriting, Propel viewed the contact center as the next step, but committed to a thoughtful rollout that would keep people, both customers and agents, at the center of the experience.
“AI is at the foundation of Propel’s success, as is excellence in customer service. We knew that in bringing AI further into customer service, we had to do it right…”
– Gary Edelstein, President and Chief Operating Officer
Solution
To address these challenges, Propel selected Cresta for its ability to adapt to their needs, deliver results quickly, and act as a true partner. Cresta worked closely with Propel’s operations team to identify high-impact use cases for automation, starting with account management, payment inquiries, and application support —areas where implementing an AI-based solution could provide immediate value. This approach aligned with Propel’s broader goal of improving efficiency while sustaining headcount as customer and call volumes increased.
Leadership’s philosophy was clear: AI should be a support system for agents, not a replacement. That people-first commitment helped build trust early and encouraged adoption across teams. Cresta’s AI Agent offered strong resolution capabilities while enabling seamless handoffs to live agents when needed.
Propel deployed Cresta’s unified platform across its contact centers, including:
- AI Agent for Chat: Handles routine questions and resolves common issues, transferring complex cases to live agents when needed.
- Agent Assist: Delivers real-time behavioral guidance with best practices, automated suggestions, and AI-generated summaries, reducing repetitive tasks and giving agents more time to focus on customers while ensuring consistent, high-quality interactions.
- Conversation Intelligence: Provides full visibility into all customer interactions, allowing Propel to analyze high-volume, high-resolution conversations and rapidly identify and triage emergency trends or issues.
Conversational Intelligence not only provided real-time guidance to agents, but also delivered continuous insights that fed back into Agent Assist for ongoing improvement.
Cresta is now in use across Customer Service, Loan Origination, and Collections. Early results have validated the investment.
“Cresta brought a level of partnership and responsiveness we hadn’t seen elsewhere. It wasn’t just a software contract. It felt like a shared mission. They, like us, want to empower our customer service agents and put humans at the centre of AI power.”
– Brad Sherk Vice President, Operations & Shared Services
What’s Next
Propel is expanding Cresta across additional brands and teams, with a full rollout of AI Agent underway. As the company scales, it remains committed to responsible growth, using AI to handle routine interactions efficiently while enabling agents to focus on complex, high-value conversations.
For Propel, AI is about equipping teams to succeed, grow, and deliver better experiences for customers and employees.
Results
AI Agent: Efficiency without compromise
- 58% chat containment rate, allowing teams to focus on higher-value interactions
- Supports 30–40% forecasted growth in contact volume with minimal headcount increases
Agent Assist & Auto Summary: Helping agents work smarter
- 50% reduction in ACW, from 3 minutes to 90 seconds
- More consistent, complete and accurate call summaries, boosting agent confidence and focus
- Reinforces best practices in real time and provides behavioral guidance that helps agents continuously improve
Conversational Intelligence: Turning conversations into insights
- Call monitoring increased to 100%, improving visibility into compliance, customer interactions, and risk factors
- Stronger insights into coaching needs, performance trends, and customer sentiment
- Collections team engages customers earlier and resolves issues more effectively
- Ongoing AI Agent performance analysis, including containment, transfer rates, and resolution outcomes, drives continuous improvement
“We’ve already seen the impact Cresta is having on our teams and customers, driving faster, smoother interactions and this is just the beginning.”
