African Bank Collections

The Challenge

African Bank's collections centre runs 210 agents across two shifts. Evaluating collections calls presents a unique dual challenge: agents must comply with the National Credit Act while simultaneously using persuasive, high-empathy communication techniques to maximise promise-to-pay outcomes. Previous QA scored compliance separately from soft skills — creating two reports that supervisors reconciled manually every month.

Promise-to-pay rates had plateaued at 34% for two consecutive quarters. Analysis suggested the issue wasn't agent effort — it was inconsistent application of objection-handling techniques that had been documented but never systematically evaluated or coached.

The Solution

African Bank's QA team used QUALICORE's scorecard builder to consolidate NCA compliance checks and soft-skills assessment into a single unified evaluation. Every mandatory NCA disclosure (credit cost disclosure, cooling-off rights, reckless lending prohibition) was mapped to a fatal-fail criterion tagged nca_non_compliance — any miss scores 0% and triggers an automatic escalation. Soft-skills dimensions for empathy, objection handling, and call structure are weighted alongside compliance, eliminating the separate manual reports.

The coaching plan module was configured with the bank's objection-handling playbook. When an agent fails the "handles objections effectively" dimension, QUALICORE automatically generates a coaching plan pre-populated with the relevant playbook section. Team leaders conduct structured role-play sessions, recorded in QUALICORE with digital signatures from both parties.

The Results

NCA compliance adherence — measured as the percentage of evaluations with zero fatal-fail triggers — reached 93% within 5 months, up from 69%. The unified scorecard eliminated the manual reconciliation step and saved team leaders 6 hours per month each. Promise-to-pay rates improved from 34% to 46% over the same period.

Three months post go-live, the QA team identified the "financial hardship probe" call stage as a leading indicator of PTP success. They increased its scorecard weighting and built a targeted coaching intervention — driving a further 4-point PTP improvement tracked entirely within QUALICORE.