Case studies

Building customer operations from zero

situation

When I joined there was no website. There was investor money and a plan, and none of the customer-facing operations a lender needs.

what I did

• Stood up applicant support, denial questions, loan servicing, outbound payment-reminder calls and collections calls.
• Set up an automated phone menu that routed callers by what they needed.
• Wrote the customer FAQ, the agent reports and the scoring standards agents were measured against.
• Moved daily call work into ClickUp task lists so agents knew who to call without opening each loan.
• Directed an outsourced vendor team (12 people at first, 4 as funding ran down) and managed our Head of CX, who ran three contracted agents in Mexico. I traveled there to meet them.
• Noticed a pattern in calls and set up a Spanish contact address. I also kept pushing to make Spanish the default experience, with an English toggle.

Cutting ACH returns by more than 60%

situation

Loan payments were collected by ACH. Every returned payment costs money, creates servicing work, and counts against you under NACHA rules.

what I did

• Set up monitoring on returns so they got worked, not just logged.
• Built outbound payment-reminder calls aimed at cutting returns and first-payment defaults.
• Tightened the servicing workflow and its controls, and coordinated with our vendors on the fixes.

Collection letters by days past due

situation

Collections ran on phone calls. Serious delinquency was running at about 62% of cohorts.

what I did

• Started a weekly collection-letter program, split into tiers: 30 to 59, 60 to 74, and 75+ days past due.
• Wrote the SOPs and the letter templates for each tier myself.
• Automated it into batches of 10 to 30 letters so it ran every week without depending on anyone remembering.

The sync bug that made good borrowers look late

situation

Some borrowers were being charged twice. Others were flagged as late even though they had paid. It hit roughly 25 to 50 customers at a time.

what I did

• Diagnosed it as a sync bug on the vendor's side, not a borrower or agent error.
• Compiled the affected customer lists, account by account, so the problem could not be waved off as a one-off.
• Took the lists to the vendor and pushed until they corrected it.

Same instinct, smaller catch: a payment that showed as paid in our system had actually failed at the payment processor. I flagged it and pushed the vendor for an audit.

Reconciling the portfolio before an investor call

situation

Before an investor discussion, our loan system reported a portfolio of about $428K. That number was not what we could actually collect.

what I did

• Reconciled the system figure against the real collectible balance, which came to about $244K plus collections.
• Traced why the two numbers were different, so the gap could be explained and not just noted.

Related cleanup: I audited four legal-referral batches and found three loans that had been sent to the attorney but never written off, then helped set a clean write-off policy.