Contact centre and collections transformation for a Colombian bank

The client is a Colombian commercial bank serving approximately 2.1 million retail and small-business customers through a national branch network, a mobile application and a contact centre. Its customer base includes a diaspora segment in the United States and Spain who hold Colombian accounts and transact across borders.

The bank's contact centre was failing on the most basic measure. Call abandonment stood at 24.1%, meaning nearly one in four callers hung up before speaking to anyone. During month-end peaks the rate exceeded 35%. Customers responded by going to branches, which pushed urban branch queues past an hour and made the branch network the bank's most expensive service channel. Collections was a larger problem. The internal team recovered 41% of balances in the one-to-thirty day bucket, against a market benchmark the bank's own consultants placed closer to 60%. The team was small, worked business hours only, and used manual dialling and spreadsheet tracking, so many accounts were never contacted before rolling into the next bucket.

Regulatory and operational reporting added a persistent drag. Back-office staff spent an estimated 850 person-hours monthly on manual compilation and reconciliation, work performed by people hired for judgement rather than data entry.

Building internally was not affordable. The bank's modelling showed that reaching the required capacity would need a headcount increase its cost-to-income ratio could not absorb, and that recruiting collections specialists at volume would take many months in a competitive Bogotá labour market.

The bank ran a formal tender with five bidders, three of them Colombian. Corpshore Colombia won on a combination of scale credibility and governance. The bank's risk committee was specifically concerned about outsourcing collections and customer data, and Corpshore's Toronto parent governance, combined with a documented Ley 1581 compliance position and the group's information security framework, satisfied a committee that had previously blocked outsourcing proposals.

Corpshore also proposed taking collections and customer service together rather than separately, arguing that the two functions share the same customer and that splitting them across providers would produce the fragmented experience the bank was trying to fix. Two competing bids had proposed contact centre only.

The engagement launched with 40 agents and scaled to 132 across three functions: 76 in inbound service, 42 in collections, 14 in back office. Eleven team leaders, four QA analysts and two MIS analysts sit within the account. Service runs 06:00 to 22:00 seven days, collections 08:00 to 20:00 Monday to Saturday within permitted contact windows under Colombian consumer protection practice. All work is performed in Bogotá on the bank's core systems through a dedicated secure environment.

Abandonment before anything else. The first ninety days targeted a single metric. Capacity was sized against interval-level historical volume rather than daily averages, and a workforce management function was established where none existed.

Collections segmentation. The prior approach treated all delinquent accounts identically. Corpshore introduced segmentation by balance, delinquency age, product and prior contact history, so high-recovery-probability accounts are contacted first and lowvalue accounts handled through lower-cost digital channels.

Contact strategy rather than dialling. Collections moved from manual dialling to a designed contact strategy with defined attempt patterns, channel sequencing across voice, SMS and WhatsApp, and documented treatment paths, giving the bank a usable collections data asset for the first time.

Reporting automation. The back-office team automated the compilation and reconciliation steps in the reporting cycle, reducing an 850-hour monthly manual burden to a reviewed exception process.

Inbound call abandonment rate

Call abandonment fell from 24.1% to 3.6% by month 12. The bank's branch traffic data showed a 21% reduction in service-only branch visits over the same period.

Collections recovery in the one-to-thirty day bucket rose from 41% to 62%, moving the bank from well below its market benchmark to at it, with improvement across every bucket.

Reporting effort fell from approximately 850 person-hours monthly to 200, with the released capacity redeployed to analysis.

The collections data asset built during the engagement now informs credit policy as well as collections operations. The workforce management function has been extended by the bank to its branch scheduling. Corpshore Colombia has since been engaged for the bank's onboarding and KYC back office.