Finora Lending services a consumer installment portfolio through a small in-house collections floor: eleven operators, two supervisors and one compliance lead. Almost all early-stage work happens by phone, because a borrower who is a few days past due answers a call far more often than an email or a portal notice. Voice is also where tone decides whether an account cures quietly or turns into a complaint on the regulator's desk.
The challenge
Early-stage payment reminders were repetitive, draining for agents and inconsistent across the portfolio.
Most accounts just needed a friendly nudge and an easy way to pay, not a hard call.
Every morning the reminder desk opened the same list: accounts one to fifteen days past due, most of them late for boring reasons. A card expired, payday shifted, a salary account changed, someone simply forgot the installment date. The operator said the same twelve sentences eighty times a day, and by mid-afternoon the tone had drifted from friendly reminder to clipped obligation, which is exactly the point where borrowers stop cooperating.
Coverage was the second problem. Calls only went out during office hours, so shift workers, drivers and market traders were unreachable in practice. First contact often landed on day nine or day twelve, by which point the account had already aged into a harder bucket and the conversation had to be a negotiation instead of a nudge.
Nothing was consistent across the portfolio. Promise-to-pay dates lived in free-text notes, dispositions were coded differently by each operator, and supervisors could not tell at a glance which accounts had actually been reached and which had only been dialed. Two operators rotated off the reminder desk in one quarter because the work was pure repetition with no visible progress.
Why earlier attempts failed
Bulk SMS reminder blasts A one-way message with a payment link gave borrowers who needed to move a date or verify the installment schedule nowhere to reply, so silence looked identical to refusal.
Predictive dialer push Dial counts rose but real conversations did not: abandoned calls and rushed openings raised complaints while the same eleven operators burned out faster.
Outsourced call center pilot An external team without access to loan history read a generic script and slid into pressure wording that the compliance lead had to walk back account by account.
IVR press-1 payment tree Anything other than paying in full immediately fell out of the menu, so the borrowers who most needed a new date simply hung up.
The solution
A MyChatBot voice agent now runs the entire early-stage reminder pass for Finora: it calls before the account ages, confirms the installment details from policy, records a promise-to-pay date in CRM, and hands anything sensitive to a human without the borrower noticing a seam.
Rebuild the reminder script The Configuration Wizard turned Finora's approved soft-collection wording into a working instruction, battle-tested it against recordings of real objections, and versioned every change so the compliance lead signs off on exactly what ships.
Move calls onto Calls SDK MyChatBot Calls SDK runs the outbound reminder pass and answers return calls on the first ring in the borrower's language, while the Agent On/Off schedule keeps dialing inside the permitted call windows and weekday rules.
Ground answers in policy The Knowledge Base holds Business Domain docs on installment schedules, the grace period, late-charge rules, accepted payment methods and hardship options, and Agentic Search pulls the exact clause instead of letting the agent improvise terms.
Write outcomes into CRM edit_crm_lead stamps the account with the promise-to-pay date and disposition, add_crm_client_contact saves a newly given number, lead_chat_link attaches the recording and transcript, and every touch carries the source tag "AI-".
Route hardship to people Hand-off Control triggers a silent hand-off the moment a call turns into a dispute, a bereavement, a job loss or a request for legal representation, and Flight Control pings the collections supervisor in Telegram with the live context.
Chase lapsed promises automatically Lead Processing labels and statuses mark each promise-to-pay, and Follow-ups place a second calm call plus a WhatsApp message with the payment link when the date passes without payment.
Knowledge Base: The agent's Knowledge Base carries Finora's installment schedule and grace period rules, the late-charge and restructuring policy, accepted payment methods and channels, approved soft-collection phrasing with its forbidden wording list, hardship and dispute routing rules, and the permitted call windows by region.
Soft-collection recovery rose 29% while agents focused only on complex cases.
What was deployed
Agents used
Voice AgentLead QualifierAppointment Booker
Channels connected
VoiceWhatsAppWeb widget
Rollout timeline
Week 1
Instruction built in the Configuration Wizard from approved collection wording, Knowledge Base loaded with schedule, grace period and hardship policy, CRM fields mapped for promise-to-pay.
Week 2
Battle-testing against recorded objections, hand-off triggers and stop word set, call windows configured, pilot on a single early delinquency bucket.
Weeks 3 to 4
Rollout across the full early-stage portfolio, Follow-ups switched on for lapsed promises, operators moved onto disputes and restructuring only.
Month 2
Monthly review of transcripts with the compliance lead, script version updated, WhatsApp payment-link follow-up added after every reminder call.
Results
Metric
Before
After
Early-stage recovery rate
Flat and uneven across the portfolio, dependent on which operator worked the list
+29%
Reminder calls per day
One manual pass limited by the size of the collections floor
5×
Operator burnout on the reminder desk
Script fatigue by mid-afternoon and rotation off the desk each quarter
0
First contact attempt
Often day nine or later, office hours only
Same day the installment goes past due, in the first permitted call window
Call records in CRM
Free-text notes and inconsistent disposition codes
Every call logged with recording, transcript and promise-to-pay date under the "AI-" source
"The tone is always calm and consistent, and recovery went up, not complaints."
Yulia Bondar
Collections Lead
What comes next
Finora is extending the agent to pre-due courtesy calls the day before the installment date, so the reminder happens before the account is ever late. Restructuring intake by voice, with the request written straight into CRM as a deal, is next in line.
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