Anchor sells small-ticket personal loans to first-time borrowers — a complicated product with tight compliance rules. Their call centre had a 4-month onboarding ramp and 38% attrition. AIVA didn't replace the agents. It made them four months better on day one.
New agents would freeze on calls about prepayment penalties. AIVA whispers the right answer in their headset before they finish reading the question. Day-one agents now sound like 4-month veterans.
The challenge
Personal lending in India is a compliance minefield. RBI fair-practice code. State-by-state interest caps. Prepayment penalty rules that vary by product. Agents need to quote rules accurately, in the customer's language, on the first call.
Anchor's ramp time for a new agent was 14 weeks — three weeks of classroom training, then 11 weeks of supervised calls before they could solo. With attrition running at 38%, the call floor was always half-trained.
The result: first-call resolution stuck at 43%. More than half of all callers had to call back. Worse, ~12% of escalations were because an agent quoted a rule wrong — a regulatory headache the compliance team flagged weekly.
14-week ramp for new agents to handle calls solo.
Attrition at 38% / year — the floor was always relearning.
First-call resolution 43%. More than half of callers had to call back.
~12% of escalations stemmed from agents quoting compliance rules incorrectly.
The setup
Anchor didn't want AIVA replacing their agents. Compliance wanted humans in the loop. So they deployed AIVA as a live agent-assist — listening to every call, surfacing the right rule + customer record on screen, whispering the right answer through the agent's headset when asked.
The web widget then deployed for self-serve on the customer dashboard — balance checks, EMI questions, repayment scheduling. The compliance team wrote the escalation rules together with AIVA over four working sessions: anything touching a collection, dispute, or hardship request goes to a human within 90 seconds.
The pilot ran with 12 agents for two weeks. Then 80 for two more. Then the full floor of 340 agents. First-call resolution climbed from 43% to 71% in five weeks.
The outcomes
The thing I tell other NBFCs is — don't replace your agents. Make them four months better on day one. AIVA isn't cheaper than a human; it's a force multiplier on every human you already have.
— Rohit Bhandari, Head of Customer Operations, Anchor Finance