Building Phone Support, and Turning Its Quality Around
Category
CX Operations
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At Revolut, after helping launch email support, I moved into phone support as an Operations Manager. The department was small, covering a regulated Hungarian complaint line and a handful of vulnerable-customer cases. The goal was to grow phone into a support channel that could stand alongside chat and email, starting with a Spanish inbound line for the market entry, and to go beyond the regulatory minimum so the approach could be rolled out to other markets.
The challenge
Phone was the smallest and least developed support channel, and it had to grow quickly without dropping quality on a channel that is far less forgiving than chat or email. Stepping back, a few things had to come together at once:
The existing phone operation was minimal, a regulated Hungarian complaint line and a few vulnerable-customer cases, with no broader inbound or outbound capability.
Spain was a market entry where an inbound line was mandatory, and the aim was to go beyond the minimum and build a model worth rolling out to other markets.
Capacity was low and still being built, hiring new agents and bringing some across from chat.
Phone is live and unforgiving. On chat or email there is time to think, on a call a single wrong word cannot be taken back, so quality and verification had to be right from the start.
The approach
I owned the build and improvement of the Spanish inbound line and the outbound capability, working alongside another operations manager across the department and cross-functionally with legal, compliance, and the chat and email horizontals. As context, the department was around 60 agents under 6 team leaders, and I was responsible for 3 team leaders and indirectly roughly 30 agents.
Phase 1, build the inbound line
Stood up the Spanish inbound line from scratch: the IVR and call routing, the languages and hours, the cases the line would support, staffing and scheduling, the answer-time and service-level targets, agent training and scripts, QA, and escalation paths.
Phase 2, secure verification
Working with legal and compliance, we built a verification process that was secure but user-friendly, applied only when a request needed it, since not every caller was a Revolut user. For account-related calls it was the gate that confirmed the account was not at risk before anything moved forward, and we kept improving it from data throughout.
Phase 3, the right cases on the right channel
Created the policy for which cases are better handled on phone than chat, for example vulnerable customers and complaints, so phone capacity went where it added the most value.
Phase 4, build the outbound capability
Took outbound from almost nothing to a working line, owning the process and policy for the cases it would cover, and helped push the Power of Attorney process so the line could properly serve authorized representatives, not just account holders.
Phase 5, run on data
I reviewed KPIs daily, both to manage the team and to drive improvements. One example was my final project: our answer rate was sitting below 90%, which did not add up against our call volume and the agents on shift. I dug into the numbers, ruled out overlapping calls as the cause, and found the real issue was availability gaps during shifts, something the headline figures alone did not reveal. I built a report proving it and presented it to management, and the corrective action that followed also made the department more efficient to run.
The impact
Phone went from the least developed channel to a built-out, high-quality operation, and the quality result is the one I am proudest of.
From the worst quality scores in the support function to a perfect month with zero markdowns, on the hardest channel to get right, where mistakes cannot be undone.
KPI attainment of 132% by the time I left, clearing targets by a wide margin, not just meeting them.
A Spanish inbound line built from scratch and run as a model that could be rolled out to other markets.
An outbound capability built from almost nothing, with the policies and Power of Attorney process to support it.
A verification process that was secure and user-friendly, applied only when needed, and improved continuously from data.
Data-driven management that surfaced a real answer-rate problem and fixed it.
The hardest channel, done right
Phone is the channel with the least margin for error. There is no draft, no edit, no time to reconsider, a call either goes well or it does not. Building that channel out while taking it from the worst quality scores to a flawless month showed that live support can be both fast and exceptional, when the verification, the policies, and the standards are built in from the start.
