Beyond the Call Centre: Why the Future of Collections Is AI-Led

What does it take to move from customer engagement to resolution with Agentic AI? That question sits at the heart of the webinar we hosted recently in collaboration with Arum, featuring Katie Harris, Senior Consultant at Arum, and Nick Kanellopoulos, Senior Solutions Design Consultant at Qualco Technology.  
 
Now available to watch on demand, Beyond the Call Centre: Why the Future of Collections Is AI-Led, looks beyond AI as another communication tool and asks a bigger question: how can it actually help progress the customer journey? 

Customers are harder to reach by phone. They expect private, digital and convenient ways to understand their options and take action. Financial organisations, meanwhile, need to reduce cost-to-collect, improve response rates and manage growing case volumes without adding proportional manual effort.  

Chatbot or AI agent: What’s the difference in collections?

Traditional chatbots can answer questions but often reach a point where the customer is told: “Please call us.”  

Agentic AI is designed to go further. It can understand customer intent, identify the appropriate next action, and help progress the journey directly within the conversation, whether that means a payment, repayment option or escalation to a human agent. 

That brings an important distinction into focus: AI in communications is different from AI in financial resolution.  And for collections teams, that difference matters. 

During the webinar, attendees were asked about the biggest operational challenge in their collections function. 

• 41% said too much agent time is spent on routine customer interactions. 

• A further 35% pointed to low response and contact rates.

Taken together, the results highlight two sides of the same challenge: collections teams are spending significant human effort on routine interactions, while still working to improve customer engagement. 

The value of AI and where to draw the line

The value of AI in collections goes beyond cost reduction. Katie and Nikos discuss how the value of AI comes from a combination of cost, capacity and customer experience, including what happens when routine interactions can progress without requiring an agent at every step. 

But greater autonomy raises another, more difficult question: how much of the journey should AI actually manage? 

58% said their biggest hesitation would be AI handling vulnerable or distressed customers incorrectly.

That result points to an important limit to automation: greater AI autonomy only works when the right boundaries and escalation points are in place. 

The webinar explores how human expertise can remain focused on vulnerability, hardship and sensitive cases, while AI takes on more repeatable interactions. 

How Agenly turns conversations into action

So, what does AI-led resolution look like in practice? Agenly, Qualco Technology’s cloud-native Agentic AI platform for customer resolution, is designed to move the customer journey beyond conversation by: 

1️⃣ Understanding customer intent 
2️⃣ Determining the next appropriate action   
3️⃣ Progressing the journey towards resolution  

For customers, that means being able to move from a question or response to a meaningful next step within the same interaction. For collections teams, it means connecting those conversations to the wider treatment journey rather than treating them as standalone digital touchpoints. 

See how that journey comes together with Agenly 👇 

 Ready to explore what it takes to move from customer contact to resolution, and the role AI and human judgement play along the way?