Holiday travel disruption support
Mary Pacheco

When the Holidays Move Your Busiest Travel Week

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A canceled flight two days before Christmas doesn’t generate one phone call. It generates a rebooking request, a refund inquiry from the traveler who decides not to rebook, a hotel question from whoever it stranded overnight, and a status check from three other people on the same itinerary who saw the news and got nervous before anything actually changed for them.

Holiday travel disruption support has to be built for that multiplication, not for the headline cancellation rate, because the rate is almost always low, right up until the week it isn’t. The teams that get caught off guard aren’t the ones who ignored the forecast. They’re the ones who planned around the average year instead of the year that actually shows up.

Why a low cancellation rate doesn’t mean a quiet contact center

The volume moving through the system this season is not a modest number. AAA projects 122.4 million Americans will travel at least 50 miles from home over the year-end holiday period, a new record and a 2.2% increase over the prior year’s own record. That’s the population any disruption draws from, and even a small percentage of it running into a delay, a missed connection or a cancellation is a large absolute number of contacts arriving in a short window.

The disruption rate itself is where the real unpredictability lives. The U.S. cancellation rate over the 2023 Christmas and New Year’s travel period was just 0.8% — but the same window the year before ran at 8.2%, a tenfold difference driven by a single bad weather system rather than any change in airline reliability. A support plan built around “cancellation rates are usually low” is a plan built around the typical year, not the year that actually tests it. Staffing to the average and hoping the bad year doesn’t land on your calendar is a bet, not a plan — and it’s a bet the traveler on hold doesn’t know you’re making.

What each kind of disruption actually generates

Three disruption types drive nearly all of the volume, and each one produces a different first contact, not a generic “help” ticket:

DisruptionWhat triggers the contactTypical first requestWhat follows if not resolved on the first contact
Weather delayA delay is posted before departure, flight still expected to operateStatus check — “will I still make my connection”Repeat-contact rate on unresolved status checks.
Missed connectionA delay or gate change causes the connecting flight to be missedRebooking onto the next available optionFrequently cascades into a hotel or meal-voucher request once the rebooking pushes past same-day
CancellationThe flight is removed from the schedule entirelyRefund or rebooking — the traveler’s choice under DOT’s passenger-rights ruleAverage handle-time difference between a refund request and a rebooking request.

The sequencing matters as much as the category. A weather delay that resolves on its own generates one contact. The same delay, left unresolved for a few hours, generates a second wave once it starts causing missed connections, and a missed connection that pushes past midnight generates a third wave of hotel and meal-related contacts on top of the rebooking itself.

None of the three waves replaces the one before it; they stack, which is why a disruption that looks manageable in hour one can look like a full-blown queue backup by hour four. The reservations, itinerary changes and guest support work that travel and hospitality brands run day to day has to absorb all three waves from the same root disruption, not just the first one.

Coverage timing compounds the problem. Weather-driven cancellations don’t wait for business hours, and neither do the passengers affected by them. Coverage that doesn’t go quiet at 6pm when a flight gets cancelled at 9 is the difference between a traveler reaching someone at midnight and a traveler discovering the queue reopens at 8am, by which point the missed-connection cascade described above has usually already happened.

What a support team needs to handle this well

Getting ahead of the sequencing described above means the team answering the phone, chat and email when a trip goes sideways needs to recognize which wave a given contact belongs to, not just log it as a generic complaint.

A rebooking request and a hotel-voucher request from the same disrupted passenger are two different resolutions, and treating the second one as a repeat of the first slows both down.

Not every contact in that cascade needs a person on it immediately. AI handling the first wave of rebooking and status questions can absorb the initial spike of “am I still on this flight” checks, freeing trained agents for the harder second and third waves, the hotel arrangements, the refund disputes, the itinerary rebuilds that actually need judgment.

The underlying skill required here isn’t unique to travel, the general playbook for absorbing a volume spike applies whether the trigger is a storm system or a product launch, but travel disruption compresses that spike into hours instead of days, which is what makes the sequencing above worth planning around specifically.

The takeaway

The travel and hospitality brands that get through a bad weather week without a service collapse aren’t the ones betting on the cancellation rate staying low. They’re the ones who built a plan for the week it doesn’t, and who know, before the first delay is even posted, which wave of contacts they’re looking at and what it will take to close it.

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Support that doesn’t wait for the delay to end

Mary Pacheco, Client Services Manager at Redial BPO

Mary Pacheco

Client Services Manager · Travel & Hospitality

Redial’s travel and hospitality teams handle reservations and bookings, itinerary changes and cancellations, and 24/7 guest support — built to absorb a disruption cascade, not just the first wave of it.

FAQ: When the Holidays Move Your Busiest Travel Week

1. How much does holiday travel volume actually increase support demand?

AAA projects 122.4 million Americans will travel at least 50 miles from home during the year-end holiday period, a new record. Even a small disruption rate applied to that population produces a large absolute number of contacts, which is why volume planning matters more than the headline disruption percentage.

2. Are flight cancellation rates predictable during the holidays?

Not reliably. U.S. Department of Transportation data shows the cancellation rate over the 2023 Christmas and New Year’s period was just 0.8%, compared to 8.2% the year before, a tenfold swing driven by a single severe weather event rather than any underlying change in airline reliability.

3. What’s the difference between a weather delay, a missed connection and a cancellation in terms of support demand?

Each generates a different first request: a weather delay typically prompts a status check, a missed connection prompts a rebooking request, and a cancellation prompts a refund or rebooking choice under DOT’s passenger-rights rules. Left unresolved, a delay or missed connection can cascade into a second and third wave of hotel or meal-related contacts.

4. Can AI handle holiday travel disruption support on its own?

AI is well suited to the first wave of a disruption: Status checks and straightforward rebooking questions, which absorbs a large share of the initial spike. The later waves, like hotel arrangements or refund disputes, typically require a trained agent who can exercise judgment the situation calls for.

5. Why does coverage timing matter more for travel disruptions than for other industries?

Weather-driven delays and cancellations happen at any hour, and the passengers affected need help immediately, not the next business morning. Coverage that goes quiet overnight means a disruption that starts in the evening can cascade through several contact waves before a support team is available to respond.

holiday season staffing lead time
Dyamond Dickenson

The Hiring Clock: How Far Ahead Capacity Decisions Have to Happen

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Every October, some retail team finds out the hard way that “we’ll hire when volume picks up” was never actually a plan. By the time order volume makes the staffing gap obvious, the clock that mattered has already run out. Holiday season staffing lead time isn’t measured in the days before Black Friday, it’s measured in weeks before that, and most of those weeks are already behind us by the time a retailer starts asking the question seriously.

I have this conversation with retail teams every August, and the ones who wait until October to have it are always working from a shorter list of options than the ones who started earlier.

Why the clock starts earlier than it feels like it should

Retailers planned to hire between 265,000 and 365,000 seasonal workers for the most recent holiday season, according to National Retail Federation data, the lowest total in more than 15 years, down from 442,000 the year before. Fewer seasonal hires overall doesn’t mean less pressure on the ones a retailer does need, it means the labor pool a retailer is competing for is smaller, which makes waiting even more expensive than it used to be.

The government’s own data on the shape of this cycle backs up why timing matters as much as headcount. The buildup and the subsequent layoff both follow a predictable calendar pattern, hiring concentrated from October through December, followed by layoffs in January and February, according to Bureau of Labor Statistics research on seasonal retail employment.

That predictability is exactly what makes late planning inexcusable: this isn’t a surprise pattern retailers are reacting to for the first time. It repeats every year, on roughly the same calendar, and the retailers caught flat-footed are the ones who treated this year’s version as a new problem instead of a known one.

The pattern holds on the customer service side just as reliably as it does on the store floor. Contact volume doesn’t ramp up gradually starting in November, it steps up sharply the moment a major promotional event hits, and stays elevated through the last week of December before dropping off just as fast.

A team calibrated for October’s ticket volume is, by definition, undersized for the week Black Friday actually happens, and no amount of overtime in the moment closes a gap that size.

What actually has to happen before the volume hits

Training a seasonal or overflow agent to handle order status, returns and product questions at the standard a retailer’s regular customers expect takes real time: Sourcing candidates, running them through product and systems training, and getting them comfortable enough to handle a real conversation without escalating everything back to a supervisor who’s already stretched thin.

Compress that timeline and the quality gap shows up exactly when it matters most: During the highest-volume, highest-visibility weeks of the year, when a slow or wrong answer is far more likely to become a public complaint than it would be in a quiet month.

That’s why the practical question isn’t “how many people do we need,” it’s “when do we need to have started.” Coverage built around when order volume actually peaks, rather than a headcount plan finalized once and left alone, is what separates a program that holds through the surge from one that only looks adequate on a staffing spreadsheet.

A retailer running the order status, returns and peak-season overflow work retail programs actually need to absorb has to build that capacity with enough runway that training is finished, not just started, before the first heavy week arrives.

What the lead time actually buys

The advantage of planning early isn’t just avoiding a scramble, it’s access to a delivery model that can flex capacity up for the peak weeks and back down afterward without triggering a layoff cycle, which is a fundamentally different staffing tool than a purely domestic hire-and-release cycle. That flexibility only works if it’s built into the plan early enough to actually train the people who’ll be answering calls and chats during the peak.

Volume that outpaces even a well-planned team doesn’t have to become a service failure either. AI-assisted overflow handling for the volume a human team can’t fully absorb can catch the routine order-status and tracking questions that make up a large share of peak-season contact volume, freeing trained agents for the conversations that actually need a person.

Retailers evaluating any partner for this kind of seasonal support should work from the broader checklist for evaluating any call center partner before assuming a general-purpose vendor can absorb a retail-specific volume spike without retail-specific preparation.

If your team is headed to Shoptalk Fall this September, capacity planning for this exact window is a conversation worth having in person — find us at the show or reach out before it.

The takeaway

The retailers who come through peak season without a service collapse aren’t the ones who reacted fastest once volume spiked. They’re the ones who treated the hiring clock as already running the day the previous season ended, and built the next one’s plan while this year’s numbers were still fresh enough to actually use.

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Peak-season capacity, staffed with runway to train

Dyamond Dickenson, Client Services Executive at Redial BPO

Dyamond Dickenson

Client Services Executive · Retail & E-Commerce

Redial’s retail teams handle order taking and order status, returns and exchanges, and peak-season volume absorption — staffed and trained with enough runway to hold through the surge, not scramble during it.

FAQ: The Hiring Clock: How Far Ahead Capacity Decisions Have to Happen

1. How far in advance should retailers start holiday staffing decisions?

raining a seasonal or overflow agent to handle real customer conversations takes weeks, not days, so the planning window has to start well before volume actually rises. Waiting until October, when the pressure becomes visible, generally means starting the process behind where it needed to be.

2. Why does seasonal hiring keep getting harder even when retailers plan the same way every year?

The National Retail Federation’s most recent holiday hiring forecast put planned seasonal hires at their lowest level in more than 15 years, meaning retailers are competing for a smaller seasonal labor pool even as peak-season volume itself hasn’t shrunk. That combination makes early planning more valuable, not less, than in years with a larger available labor pool.

3. Does holiday customer service volume follow a predictable pattern?

Yes. Bureau of Labor Statistics data on seasonal retail employment shows hiring concentrated from October through December and layoffs concentrated in January and February — a pattern that repeats every year. Contact volume on the customer service side follows a similarly sharp, predictable ramp tied to major promotional events rather than a gradual rise.

4. What’s the advantage of a flexible staffing model over hiring seasonal employees directly?

A flexible delivery model can scale capacity up for peak weeks and back down afterward without the retailer running its own hire-and-release cycle each year, which avoids both the recruiting effort and the training ramp-up that comes with building a new seasonal team from scratch every season.

5. Can AI handle holiday customer service volume instead of hiring more staff?

AI-assisted tools are well suited to routine, high-volume questions like order status and tracking, which make up a large share of peak-season contact volume. They work best paired with trained human agents for the conversations that need judgment, rather than as a full replacement for seasonal staffing.

shoptalk fall 2026
Elder Gonzalez

Shoptalk Fall 2026: Getting Ready for Peak Season CX

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Every fall, retail leaders spend three days comparing 2027 strategies before a single Black Friday order has shipped. That is the paradox of Shoptalk Fall 2026, running September 29 through October 1 at Music City Center in Nashville: the room is planning next year while this year’s hardest 90 days, Black Friday, Cyber Monday, Christmas, and the returns wave that follows, are still ahead of us.

I will be there with our CEO, Jason Heil, and the question we keep asking clients is the one peak season customer service planning tends to skip: who is actually answering the phone in week three of December?

The peak season most plans still underestimate

By September, most retail and eCommerce leaders have already signed off on their peak plan. Forecasts are locked, seasonal hiring is in flight, and the AI copilots are in QA. That does not mean the plan is finished. Every year we see the same pattern: the plan is built for the expected curve, and the operation is judged on the exception weeks, the viral SKU, the carrier miss, the payment outage, the one policy edit that doubles WISMO for three days.

If you are still tuning your plan, or already looking for a backup on capacity, this is the window to do it. Nearshore and offshore support teams that go live in November are a very different conversation from the ones that go live in mid-October.

Who Shoptalk Fall is actually for

Shoptalk Fall 2026 carries a blunt mandate for the retailers in the room: bring your 2027 strategy, leave with an action plan. More than 3,500 retail leaders are expected, roughly one in three at the C-suite level, spanning apparel, beauty, electronics, grocery, and marketplace operators (Shoptalk Fall 2026).

If you are a VP of Customer Experience, a Director of Contact Center Operations, or a Chief Customer Officer at a retail or e-commerce company somewhere between 200 and 2,000 employees, this event is built for you, and so is the harder conversation nobody schedules a session for: what happens to your support team the week order volume triples. If your own team is headed to Nashville, you will find ours at the same show.

The math behind “peak season”

Last November and December, US shoppers set a record: 202.9 million people shopped from Thanksgiving through Cyber Monday in 2025, the largest stretch NRF has tracked, on the way to November to December retail sales that topped $1 trillion for the first time.

Volume is only half the operational problem. The other half lands in January. That is when returns and order-spike handling built for retail’s busiest weeks stops being a nice-to-have and becomes the difference between a customer who reorders and one who does not.

Post-Christmas returns alone jumped nearly 5% year-over-year in the final six days of December 2025, according to Adobe Analytics data reported by Digital Commerce 360, and fraud made up a growing share of what came back. Retailers that treat returns as a January afterthought are already behind.

Our own 2026 State of Retail and eCommerce Customer Support trend report unpacks the returns economics in detail, using the NRF projection of $849.9 billion in US returns for 2025, with 19.3% of online sales returned and 9% of all returns fraudulent, and lays out a working playbook for segmenting clean and complex returns, prioritizing exchanges over refunds, and instrumenting the fraud signals that matter.

What I am bringing to the conversation

Jason and I are not going to Nashville to pitch a platform. Every CX leader we talk to is running the same math heading into Q4:

  • Hire seasonal agents you will likely lose by February.
  • Lean entirely on AI and risk one bad review going viral in week two of December.
  • Or find a partner who can scale support without dropping service levels when the call queue triples overnight.

A practical playbook for absorbing that kind of spike without losing service quality is worth revisiting before the show, not after.

That is the conversation worth having before the floor opens. If peak season readiness is on your list this quarter, find us in Nashville, or book time with our team any week between now and Black Friday.

Two resources to bring into your Q4 planning

If you want to walk into Nashville with sharper questions, these two resources are built for exactly this window:

  • The 2026 State of Retail and eCommerce Customer Support. Our current trend report for $10M to $1B retail, eCommerce, and DTC leaders. Five focused playbooks cover automation and specialized human judgment, returns economics and post-purchase support, agentic AI readiness, variable SaaS pricing and peak support costs, and continuity planning across delivery geographies.
  • The Redial Retail and eCommerce hub. Turnkey retail programs and playbooks for order status, returns and exchanges, upselling, cross-selling, and PCI DSS-compliant handling of payment information across ecommerce, brick-and-mortar, grocery, department, specialty, and discount formats. Sub-segment playbooks for DTC, marketplace, franchise, omnichannel, and luxury sit inside the same hub, alongside the agentic commerce support readiness work for teams pressure-testing where humans should stay in the loop.

Use them to stress-test your own plan against a base case, an expected case, and a peak case that includes BFCM, late-December returns, a carrier failure, a viral product event, and a system outage.

Takeaway

Shoptalk Fall 2026 will spend three days planning 2027. The retailers who leave in the best shape will be the ones who also protected the next 90 days, the ones where a customer judges a brand by how fast a return gets processed, not by next year’s roadmap. If that is where your team feels exposed heading into Black Friday, let us talk before the queue backs up.

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Ready Before Retail’s Busiest 90 Days

Mary Pacheco, Client Services Manager at Redial BPO

Mary Pacheco

Client Services Manager · Retail & E-Commerce

Mary’s team absorbs peak-season order volume without adding headcount, handles returns and exchanges at scale, and keeps order-status support consistent even when call volume triples.

FAQ: ShopTalk Fall 2026 and Peak Season Readiness

1. What is Shoptalk Fall 2026?

Shoptalk Fall 2026 is a retail industry conference running September 29 through October 1, 2026, at Music City Center in Nashville — the first time the event has been held in that city. It’s organized by Shoptalk Global and is expected to draw more than 3,500 retail and consumer brand leaders, with roughly one in three attendees at the C-suite level, across categories including apparel, beauty, electronics, grocery, and online marketplaces.

2. Who should attend Shoptalk Fall 2026?

The event is aimed at VPs of Customer Experience, Directors of Contact Center Operations, Chief Customer Officers, and BPO or vendor procurement leads at retail and e-commerce companies, generally those in the 200-to-2,000-employee range weighing how to handle order-volume spikes, seasonal staffing, or returns before the holidays.

3. What is Shoptalk Fall 2026’s main focus?

Organizers have framed the 2026 edition around helping retailers build a 2027 strategy, with sessions on AI-driven operations, modernizing tech stacks, shopper experience, and the convergence of commerce and content. It follows a “fewer slides, more conversations” format built around 1:1 meetings, roundtables, and peer discussion rather than traditional keynotes.

4. How can Redial BPO help retailers get ready for Black Friday, Cyber Monday, and the holiday returns wave?

Redial builds nearshore and offshore customer service teams that scale up for peak-season volume and scale back down afterward, covering order status, returns and exchanges, and support across voice, chat, and email — without a retailer carrying the cost of a seasonal in-house team year-round. Elder Gonzalez and Jason Heil will be at Shoptalk Fall 2026 in Nashville to discuss peak-season CX planning directly with attendees.

5. It is already September. Is it too late to add outsourced capacity for this peak season?

No, but the window is narrow. Nearshore and offshore programs that go live before BFCM typically need to lock scope and start hiring by mid-October at the latest. Between mid-October and Black Friday, the realistic plays are targeted overflow for voice and chat, WISMO and order-status containment, and returns and exchange backfill for January. Anything requiring full agent certification on a complex retailer stack is better positioned as a January and February kickoff for the next peak cycle. If your current plan is holding through BFCM but you are worried about the returns wave, the returns and post-purchase workstream is the one to move on first.

6. What SLAs and channels can Redial support during peak?

Redial staffs voice, chat, email, and back-office queues 24/7 across Mexico, South Africa, and the Philippines, with Florida available on demand for onshore-sensitive work. Program design covers order status and WISMO, returns and exchanges, refund and logistics synchronization, cancellation and address changes, product and fitment questions, promo and coupon issues, loyalty account support, and fraud referral. Service targets, staffing curves, and shrinkage assumptions are built from the retailer’s own baseline rather than a generic uplift.

7. How does Redial handle payment data and PCI DSS during peak surges?

Redial operates PCI DSS-compliant call center teams, with payment handling scoped to the approved environment rather than assumed across every queue. During peak, PCI-scoped work is contained to certified agents and workflows so that seasonal ramp does not expand the compliance boundary. Retailers should ask any BPO partner to name the exact scope on their Attestation of Compliance rather than accept a general PCI badge.

8. Nearshore, offshore, or onshore for holiday support: which is right?

The honest answer is usually a mix. Mexico is the strongest fit for real-time nearshore voice and bilingual English and Spanish work in US time zones. South Africa and Manila extend coverage into overnight and follow-the-sun for chat, email, and back office. Florida is available on demand for onshore-sensitive work such as certain regulated or brand-critical accounts. The right ratio depends on your contact mix, language needs, compliance scope, and how much of the volume is deterministic enough to automate.

9. How does Redial work alongside our existing AI agents and helpdesk platform?

Redial operates as the human-support and readiness layer around the retailer’s chosen stack, including platforms such as Gorgias, Zendesk, Kustomer, and Salesforce Service Cloud. Agents handle exceptions, escalations, and high-emotion or revenue-linked contacts that the AI is not authorized or ready to complete, and provide the mandate evidence, review, and quality signal that keeps the automation improving. This is the approach detailed in our 2026 State of Retail and eCommerce Customer Support trend report under agentic AI readiness and human-support execution.

10. What should we bring to a peak-season planning conversation with Redial?

A one-month sample of contact reasons by channel and hour, your current peak forecast by week, the current policy and workflow for returns and cancellations, and the systems in play, order management, helpdesk, WMS, payment, and any AI agents already in production. That is enough to size a base, expected, and stress case together and decide where nearshore capacity, offshore continuity, back-office execution, and automation each earn their seat.

11. Where can I meet Redial at Shoptalk Fall 2026?

Elder Gonzalez, VP of Client Services, and Jason Heil, CEO, will be onsite at Music City Center in Nashville from September 29 through October 1, 2026. To reserve time in advance, book a slot with Mary Pacheco, our Client Services Manager for Retail and E-Commerce, and we will confirm a meeting window during the show.

outsourcing charged-off account recovery
Yessica Peña

Why US Banks Are Rethinking How They Recover Charged-Off Accounts

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A bank that wrote off $10 million in credit card balances last quarter isn’t done with that money, it’s just moved it into a different phase of recovery, one that most banks are quietly restructuring right now. Outsourcing charged-off account recovery used to be a decision community banks made reluctantly, after in-house collections had clearly stopped working.

That’s changing. More banks, including some that never seriously considered it before, are rethinking the assumption that recovery has to stay in-house at all. I hear a version of the same question from almost every bank I talk to this year, and it isn’t “should we outsource”, it’s “why haven’t we already“.

The recovery math banks can no longer ignore

The charge-off rate on credit card loans at all commercial banks climbed to 4.03% in the fourth quarter of 2025, according to Federal Reserve data, and the picture is worse for banks outside the 100 largest, where the rate runs several points higher. That’s not a one-quarter blip, it’s a sustained level that keeps a growing pool of charged-off balances sitting on the books longer than banks are staffed to work them.

The volume problem compounds with a timing problem. Charge-offs lag the delinquency that caused them by three to four quarters, which means the accounts hitting recovery teams this year reflect stress that started building over a year ago, and the accounts still working through delinquency now will land on someone’s desk well into next year. A bank sized to handle last year’s charge-off volume is already behind on this year’s, and the gap compounds every quarter it goes unaddressed.

That lag is exactly why a static, once-a-year staffing plan for recovery doesn’t hold up. A team built to handle a known, historical charge-off level is structurally unequipped for a volume that’s still climbing by the time next year’s budget gets set, and by the time the mismatch shows up in aging reports, the accounts that could have been recovered easily have already moved into the harder, more expensive-to-work tier.

This isn’t unique to any one bank, it’s an industry-wide pattern. For the fuller data behind why that recovery gap keeps widening, the scale of the problem is worth understanding beyond any single institution’s numbers, since the same three structural forces are pressing on every bank running recovery the way it’s always been run. What differs from bank to bank isn’t whether the pressure exists: It’s how early each one recognizes it and how much runway that leaves for a considered decision instead of a rushed one.

Why more banks are looking outside their own walls

The instinct to keep collections in-house made more sense when the technology gap between doing it internally and outsourcing it was small. That gap has widened, and not in the direction that favors staying in-house. Banks overall have increased technology spending by roughly 65% over the past 15 years, and the technology budgets of the largest banks now run more than ten times those of regional banks, a differential that keeps widening as AI-driven tools become table stakes for effective recovery rather than a nice-to-have.

A regional or community bank trying to match that capability with an internal team, built and maintained at internal scale, is fighting an economics problem that has nothing to do with how good its collectors are. Predictive scoring, omnichannel contact strategy, and compliance-monitoring tools that a large bank can amortize across millions of accounts cost roughly the same to build for a bank working a few thousand.

This is the build-versus-buy math on recovering money already written off: Not whether an in-house team can do the work, but whether it can do it at the technology and scale level the current charge-off environment actually requires.

Getting that comparison right up front avoids the more common mistake, which is discovering the gap only after a year of underperforming recovery rates, by which point the accounts that could have been recovered have aged past the point where any partner, internal or external, can do much with them.

What the decision actually involves

The recovery model doesn’t look the same for every portfolio. How fintech lenders structure recovery for a portfolio that looks nothing like a traditional bank’s is a useful comparison point precisely because it shows how much the right approach depends on the underlying loan type, the borrower relationship, and how the account was originated in the first place, a one-size answer rarely fits both.

Two decisions sit underneath the outsourcing question itself, and skipping past them tends to produce a worse outcome than the outsourcing decision alone would. The first is the return-on-investment math behind that decision: What recovery actually costs to run in-house once training, technology, compliance overhead and management time are counted honestly, not just the visible headcount cost.

The second is the choice between keeping accounts in a bank’s own name or placing them with a specialist operating under its own name, which changes both the economics and the customer relationship risk in ways that aren’t always obvious until they’ve already played out. A bank protecting a long-term deposit relationship may prefer first-party placement even at a lower recovery rate; a bank prioritizing recovery yield on accounts it’s already written off may not.

The takeaway

Banks rethinking charged-off account recovery are really working through three separate decisions, not one broad “should we outsource” question:

  • The technology gap. In-house capability now competes against a technology budget roughly ten times larger, amortized across millions of accounts rather than a few thousand — a gap that has nothing to do with how skilled a bank’s own collectors are.
  • The real cost comparison. A fully loaded in-house cost includes training, technology, compliance overhead and management time — not just the headcount line most banks compare against an outsourced quote.
  • The account-placement model. First-party recovery protects the customer relationship; third-party placement often recovers more from accounts already written off. Which one wins depends on what the bank is actually protecting.

The banks getting ahead of this aren’t necessarily the largest ones. They’re the ones that stopped treating the recovery team’s staffing plan as fixed and started treating it as a number that has to move with the charge-off rate itself.

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The build-vs-buy math, worked through together

Yessica Peña, Client Services Executive at Redial BPO

Yessica Peña

Client Services Executive · Financial Services & Lending

Redial’s financial services teams handle collections and recovery, KYC and document verification, and account servicing — built to scale with your charge-off volume, not your last budget cycle.

1. Why are more banks outsourcing charged-off account recovery now?

Two pressures are converging: charge-off rates have climbed to 4.03% at all commercial banks as of Q4 2025 per Federal Reserve data, and the technology investment needed to recover those accounts effectively has grown well beyond what most regional or community banks can build internally at competitive scale.

2. What is the actual cost comparison between in-house and outsourced recovery?

An honest comparison has to include training, technology, compliance monitoring and management overhead on the in-house side, not just visible headcount cost. Comparing a fully loaded in-house cost against a per-account outsourced cost is the calculation that actually predicts which option is cheaper — a comparison many banks skip in favor of headcount cost alone.

3. What’s the difference between first-party and third-party debt collection for banks?

First-party collection keeps the bank’s own name on the account and the recovery effort; third-party placement moves the account to a specialist operating under its own name. The choice affects both the economics of recovery and the risk to the underlying customer relationship, and the right answer depends on what the bank is prioritizing — relationship retention or recovery yield.

4. Does the recovery approach differ for fintech lenders compared to traditional banks?

Fintech lending portfolios often differ in loan structure, borrower relationship, and origination method from traditional bank portfolios, which means a recovery approach built for one doesn’t necessarily transfer cleanly to the other. The underlying loan type shapes what an effective recovery model actually looks like.

5. How long does it take charge-offs to show up after a loan becomes delinquent?

Charge-offs typically lag the delinquency that caused them by three to four quarters. That lag means the volume hitting a recovery team today reflects financial stress that began building more than a year earlier, which is part of why static, once-a-year staffing plans struggle to keep pace.

Why Enrollment Season Punishes Understaffed Phone Lines
Dyamond Dickenson

Why Enrollment Season Punishes Understaffed Phone Lines

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Every fall, the same conversation happens on a healthcare or insurance customer service floor: hold times climb, abandoned calls spike, and the team that felt adequately staffed in August is suddenly underwater in October. Open enrollment call center staffing isn’t a problem that sneaks up — the calendar is fixed and public months in advance.

It punishes teams anyway, because the gap between “we’ll be fine” and “we’re drowning” is usually a staffing decision made too late to fix once the calls start coming in. I’ve watched this play out the same way with more than one client: the team that starts the staffing conversation in July looks nothing like the one still scrambling in mid-October.

The staffing math nobody plans around

The Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services sets the same seven-week window every year: the fixed enrollment period CMS runs each fall, October 15 through December 7, when every Medicare beneficiary can review, switch, or drop coverage for the year ahead. That window isn’t a surprise. It’s published, predictable, and identical in structure year over year, which makes it strange how many phone lines still hit capacity in the first week of it.

The gap usually isn’t a lack of awareness. It’s a lack of lead time. Adding trained, licensed-adjacent staff to a healthcare or insurance support line takes weeks, not days: sourcing candidates, running them through product and compliance training, and getting them comfortable enough to handle a real member call without escalating everything. A plan built in September is already behind. A plan built in early August, with real hiring lead time built in, is the one that actually holds when volume hits.

The cost of getting the timing wrong isn’t abstract. A team that starts training new agents in late September is putting people on the phone with two, maybe three weeks of ramp-up behind them right as the highest-stakes calls of the year start coming in: a member trying to understand whether their doctor is still in-network, or whether a plan change affects a prescription they depend on.

Rushed training doesn’t just slow the call down. It shows up as a wrong answer given confidently, which is worse for the member and harder to walk back than a long hold time. The same lead-time problem shows up on the verification side of the house, where the staffing gap already straining insurance verification teams tends to compound with the enrollment-season call volume rather than existing separately from it: the same understaffed front line answers both kinds of calls.

Why the phone line becomes the bottleneck

The phone line is where every other part of open enrollment either holds together or falls apart. A member with a plan question, a benefits question, or a simple “did my enrollment go through” call is dealing with the day-to-day plan and benefits questions making up most of an insurance line’s volume during this window — not complex escalations, mostly, but a high volume of calls that all need to be answered promptly for a member to trust the process.

That trust is measurable, and it’s moving in the wrong direction. JD Power’s 2026 U.S. Medicare Advantage Study, based on responses from over 14,000 members, found overall satisfaction with Medicare Advantage plans fell to 611 on a 1,000-point scale this year, the second consecutive annual decline, with representatives and call center agents named as one of the eight factors the study measures directly. A member who can’t get through, or gets through to someone who can’t answer the question, isn’t a data point on a dashboard. They’re a renewal decision six weeks away.

The compounding problem is that open enrollment is exactly the window when a member is actively comparing options. A frustrating call during any other month is an annoyance the member absorbs and moves past. A frustrating call during open enrollment is a data point in the decision they’re actively making about whether to stay. The phone line isn’t just support during this window, it’s part of the product experience the member is evaluating.

What a staffing plan for this season actually requires

A plan that actually holds needs three things in place before the first week of the window, not during it:

  • Enough trained agents to cover the realistic peak, not last year’s average.
  • A way to flex capacity up without a multi-week hiring cycle when volume runs ahead of forecast.
  • A channel mix that doesn’t collapse onto the phone line alone when every other option gets tried first.

The same staffing math applies on the other side of the front desk. A healthcare provider fields its own version of this surge: patients calling to confirm whether a plan change affects their in-network status, whether a referral still holds, whether an appointment needs rescheduling around a new deductible.

The scheduling, billing and referral questions that keep a healthcare front desk busy this time of year spike on roughly the same calendar as the insurance line does, which means a plan built for one side of that relationship without the other is only half a plan.

A coverage model built around when the calls actually come in, rather than a fixed shift pattern built around a typical week, is the difference between a line that holds through the surge and one that only holds on paper. That’s the conversation I have most often with a healthcare or insurance team heading into this season, not “how many agents do you have,” but “when are they actually available relative to when your members are actually calling.”

None of this is unique to open enrollment specifically, the general playbook for handling a volume spike applies whether the surge comes from a holiday, a product launch, or a plan year. What’s different about this window is how little room there is to react once it starts: the surge is compressed into seven weeks, the deadline is fixed by federal regulation, and a member who can’t get through in week two doesn’t wait patiently for week five.

The takeaway

The teams that come through open enrollment without a service-level collapse are the ones who treated the staffing decision as a summer project, not a fall scramble. If your current plan for this season was built in the last few weeks, it’s worth a second look before the calls start.

Talk to a specialist

Staffed for the surge before it starts

Dyamond Dickenson, Client Services Executive at Redial BPO

Dyamond Dickenson

Client Services Executive · Healthcare

Redial’s healthcare teams handle patient scheduling and appointment setting, insurance verification and eligibility, and billing and claims inquiries — staffed with the lead time this season actually requires, not built after the surge starts.

1. When does open enrollment call center staffing need to be in place?

Staffing and training take weeks, not days, so a plan needs to be built with enough lead time to have trained agents ready before October 15, when the Medicare Annual Enrollment Period opens. Teams that start staffing conversations in September are typically already behind; those that start planning by early August have the lead time to actually hold through the surge.

2. Why does hold time get worse specifically during open enrollment?

The enrollment window is fixed by federal regulation, October 15 through December 7, and compresses a year’s worth of plan questions, coverage confirmations, and enrollment status checks into seven weeks. Call volume rises sharply while, in many organizations, staffing hasn’t scaled to match, which is what produces the hold-time spike.

3. How does open enrollment affect member satisfaction with insurance plans?

J.D. Power’s 2026 U.S. Medicare Advantage Study found overall member satisfaction fell to 611 on a 1,000-point scale, with representatives and call center agents named as one of the factors measured. Because open enrollment is when members are actively deciding whether to switch plans, a poor phone experience during this specific window carries more weight than the same experience at another time of year.

4. Is the open enrollment staffing challenge specific to insurance, or does it affect healthcare providers too?

Both. Insurance lines field plan and benefits questions, while healthcare provider front desks field a related but distinct volume of scheduling, billing, and referral questions tied to the same enrollment calendar. A staffing plan built for one side without the other typically leaves a gap on the side that wasn’t planned for.

5. What’s the fastest way to add capacity for a call volume surge without a long hiring cycle?

A coverage model that can flex staffing to match when calls actually arrive, rather than a fixed shift pattern, is the most direct way to add capacity without a multi-week internal hiring cycle. That typically means either cross-training existing staff for overflow or working with a partner that already has trained capacity available on short notice.

Everest Group PEAK Matrix
Elder Gonzalez

On the Map: Redial BPO Named an Aspirant in the Everest Group CXM Services PEAK Matrix® 2026

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Everest Group has published its Customer Experience Management (CXM) Services PEAK Matrix® Assessment 2026, and Redial BPO is in it — named an Aspirant in the Americas matrix, among 63 CX providers assessed across the Americas, EMEA, and APAC.

We want to talk about what that means, including the parts that are less flattering, because a milestone explained honestly is worth more than one inflated.

What the PEAK Matrix® actually measures

The PEAK Matrix® is Everest Group’s framework for assessing service providers. It plots each one on two axes.

The vertical axis is market impact: how many clients a provider serves and how fast that is growing, how diverse its client and revenue base is across geographies and engagement types, and — the one we care most about — the value clients report actually receiving.

The horizontal axis is vision and capability: strategy and roadmap, the depth and breadth of services offered, investment in innovation such as technology IP and domain knowledge and partnerships, and delivery footprint.

What makes the assessment carry weight with buyers is how it is built. Everest Group works from an analyst RFI process, its own transaction intelligence database, provider disclosures, and direct conversations with the enterprises actually buying CX services. In other words, a provider cannot talk its way onto the chart. The inputs are largely other people’s experience of us.

Providers land in one of three groups: Leaders, Major Contenders, or Aspirants.

Why we are proud of a starting position

We are an Aspirant. That is the entry tier, and we are not going to describe it as anything else.

Here is why it still matters. Redial BPO started in 2017. On that same chart are organizations with decades of history, tens of thousands of employees, and household-name clients. Being assessed against them, on identical criteria, by analysts who spend their days talking to CX buyers, means our work is now visible at the level of the industry rather than the level of an individual deal.

For enterprises evaluating CX partners, this matters in a practical way. Sourcing teams and advisors build shortlists from frameworks like this one. Providers who are not on the chart are frequently never considered. As of this assessment, we are in the room.

And a starting position is a measurable one. The PEAK Matrix is published annually. Where we sit today is now a public baseline — and we intend to move it.

The market is being rewritten while we climb

It would be strange to write about the future of CX right now without talking about AI.

Automation is changing which contacts reach a human, what those contacts look like when they do, and what a support program costs to run. Some of the assumptions this industry was built on are being retired in real time. The providers who struggle will be the ones whose scale makes them slow to change.

We think our size is an advantage here. We are large enough to run serious enterprise programs across Mexico, South Africa, and the Philippines, and small enough to redesign a workflow in weeks rather than quarters. Our strategic partnership with IzzyOps, an AI-first contact center platform, is central to that: bringing AI into operations in a way that makes agents better at the work rather than merely cheaper to employ.

Innovation and investment is one of the dimensions the PEAK Matrix weighs. It is also, independent of any framework, the thing that will decide which CX providers still matter in five years.

Who earned this

Two of the criteria in the assessment are value delivered and market impact. Both are, underneath the terminology, a record of what our people did.

They are the team leads coaching one more call at the end of a shift. The trainers who rebuilt a curriculum over a weekend because a client changed direction. The workforce analysts who spotted a volume spike before it became a service level breach. The agents who hit a target and then asked how to move it further. The recruiters, IT teams, and quality analysts who make all of it possible.

To every Redialer across Mexico, South Africa, and the Philippines: this assessment is a description of your work. Thank you.

What comes next

We are proud to be on the map. We are not planning to stay where we landed on it.

That means continued investment in our people and our technology, deeper AI capability through our work with IzzyOps, and the same standard on every interaction that put us here. Next year’s assessment is a chance to show movement, and we intend to earn it the way we earned this one.

If you are evaluating CX partners — or rethinking what your support operation should look like in an AI-shaped market — we should talk.

Source: Everest Group (2026). Customer Experience Management (CXM) Services PEAK Matrix® Assessment 2026. Everest Group does not endorse any vendor, product, or service depicted in its research publications.

View Customer Experience Management (CXM) Services PEAK Matrix® Assessment

Fintech customer service outsourcing
Yessica Peña

Fintech customer service outsourcing in 2026

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A blocked card, a stalled transfer, or a failed identity check is never a routine support ticket for a fintech. It touches someone’s money directly, which means the margin for error is thinner than in a typical SaaS or ecommerce help desk, and the compliance stakes are higher even when the interface is a slick app instead of a bank branch.

Fintech customer service outsourcing has to account for that difference from the first design decision, not retrofit it in once the ticket volume outgrows the founding team. The companies that get this wrong tend to make the same mistake in one of two directions: they either treat support as a cost center to minimize until a scandal forces a rebuild, or they over-hire generalist agents who can answer a question but can’t tell when a routine-looking ticket is actually a fraud case.

Fintech support looks different, but the stakes aren’t lower

It’s tempting to assume that a company built on automation needs less human support than a traditional financial institution, and the data says the opposite. PwC’s 2025 Customer Experience Survey found that 86% of consumers say human interaction is moderately or very important to their brand experience, even as AI adoption accelerates across nearly every industry — and financial products are exactly where that preference hardens, because the thing going wrong is somebody’s money, not a delayed package.

The same survey found that 52% of consumers stopped using or buying from a brand after a bad experience with its products or services. For a fintech competing on trust as much as on features, one badly handled dispute or one confusing KYC rejection can undo months of product-led growth.

A support interaction that goes well is invisible. One that goes badly becomes the reason a user closes the account and tells three people why.

This is where the fintech-versus-traditional-bank comparison actually breaks down. A traditional bank’s customer has usually chosen it for stability and has a branch, a relationship banker, or decades of brand trust to fall back on when something goes wrong. A fintech user chose the product for speed and convenience, which means the brand has less patience in reserve the moment that convenience breaks down — a slow or confusing resolution doesn’t just cost a ticket, it costs the entire premise the user signed up for.

What a fintech-specific support team actually handles

The work itself is different from general customer service in ways that matter for how a program gets staffed and trained. Agents need to verify an account, resolve a failed transfer, or walk a user through a disputed charge — each of those falling inside financial services support rather than the generic troubleshooting a typical help desk handles, and each one carrying a regulatory paper trail the agent has to get right the first time, not fix on a follow-up call.

The lending side of fintech adds its own layer. Fintech lenders managing charged-off accounts and collections are running a workflow that overlaps with support but isn’t the same job — a support agent resolving a failed payment and a collections agent working a delinquent balance need different training, different scripts, and often different compliance sign-off, even when they’re serving the same underlying customer base.

AI is already part of how this work gets done, but not in the way headlines about “AI customer service” suggest. AI-assisted verification and fraud-flagging built directly into the call lets an agent confirm an identity or catch a suspicious pattern in seconds rather than escalating and making the customer wait — the AI does the pattern-matching, a trained person still makes the judgment call on anything ambiguous.

What to build before scaling support

Compliance pressure in this space is rising, not leveling off. The CFPB’s own 2025 Consumer Response Annual Report shows complaints about money transfer and virtual currency products rose 275% over the prior year — the fastest-growing complaint category in the report, and one made up almost entirely of the exact products fintechs build. A support program that isn’t built to document and escalate correctly from day one is building compliance debt into every ticket it closes.

That’s the case for the team answering the phone, chat and email when something goes wrong with someone’s money being staffed and trained as a fintech-specific function from the start, not a generic queue that happens to handle financial tickets. Getting that structure right early avoids the more expensive version of the same fix: rebuilding the program after a compliance review flags gaps that should have been caught at hire.

Three questions are worth asking before a fintech signs with any support partner, generalist or specialist:

  • Does the partner already train agents on KYC and identity-verification workflows, or will that training happen for the first time on the account.
  • How does the partner document and escalate anything that looks like fraud, and on what timeline.
  • Does the partner’s reporting distinguish between a ticket that’s closed and a ticket that’s actually compliant, since those aren’t always the same thing.

A partner that can’t answer all three in specifics, not generalities, is not yet built for this category.

The takeaway

Once a program is live, the specific metrics worth tracking look different for fintech too — first-contact resolution on a disputed charge matters more than average handle time, and the gap between “ticket closed” and “compliance-documented” is worth watching as closely as CSAT.

Fintech customer service outsourcing done well doesn’t look like a generic support queue with a financial-services label on it. It looks like a team built from the start to handle the specific mix of speed, empathy and documentation this category actually requires — and the fintechs getting it right are the ones who built for that mix before they had to, rather than discovering the gap during a regulatory exam or a viral complaint thread.

Talk to a specialist

Support built for fintech, not retrofitted for it

Yessica Peña, Client Services Executive at Redial BPO

Yessica Peña

Client Services Executive · Financial Services & Lending

Redial’s fintech-facing teams handle KYC and identity verification, fraud and dispute handling, and account servicing — trained on the compliance paper trail from day one, not after an exam flags a gap.

FAQ: Outsourced Customer Service for Fintech in 2026

1. What makes fintech customer service outsourcing different from general customer service outsourcing?

The individual tickets carry regulatory weight that general customer service doesn’t — identity verification, fraud flagging, and dispute handling all leave a compliance paper trail that has to be accurate the first time. A generalist support vendor without that training will handle the conversation but may not handle the documentation correctly.

2. Do fintech customers actually want human support, or just fast automated answers?

Both, depending on the situation. PwC’s 2025 Customer Experience Survey found that 86% of consumers still rate human interaction as moderately or very important to their brand experience, even as AI handles more routine interactions — the preference for a human doesn’t disappear, it shifts toward the moments that actually go wrong.

3. How does regulatory scrutiny affect fintech customer support specifically?

The CFPB’s 2025 Consumer Response Annual Report shows complaints about money transfer and virtual currency products — core fintech categories — rose 275% over the prior year, the fastest-growing complaint category in the report. That volume increase raises the stakes on getting documentation and escalation right in every support interaction, not just the ones that clearly involve fraud.

4. Is AI replacing human agents in fintech customer support?

Not in the interactions that matter most. AI is increasingly used for identity verification and fraud-pattern detection inside the call itself, speeding up routine confirmation, but the judgment call on anything ambiguous — a disputed charge, an unusual account request — still goes to a trained person.

5. What should a fintech ask before choosing an outsourced support partner?

Three things worth asking directly: whether agents are already trained on KYC and identity-verification workflows, how the partner documents and escalates anything resembling fraud, and whether the partner’s reporting distinguishes a closed ticket from a compliant one. Vague answers to any of the three are a signal the partner hasn’t built for this category specifically.

Cold calling is dead?
Mary Pacheco

Cold Calling Is Dead? What’s Actually Working in B2B Sales Pipelines in 2026

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Every quarter someone on the team asks whether cold calling is worth keeping in the mix at all, and every quarter the answer gets treated as a yes-or-no question. It isn’t one. The data on B2B cold calling strategy in 2026 says something more specific: calling alone is dying, and calling as one coordinated piece of a sequence is doing more than it ever has.

Confusing the two leads to the wrong decision either way — killing a channel that still works, or running it the same isolated way it was run five years ago and wondering why it stopped, then blaming the phone instead of the process wrapped around it.

Getting this wrong is expensive in both directions: cut calling entirely and a pipeline that depended on it goes quiet for a quarter before anyone notices why; keep running it the old way and the same reps burn the same hours dialing a list nobody re-qualified, chasing a connect rate that was never going to recover on its own.

Is cold calling actually dead?

No. RAIN Group’s Center for Sales Research surveyed 488 B2B buyers and 489 sellers across 25 industries and found that 82% of buyers accept meetings at least occasionally with sellers who reach out to them cold — a number that has not collapsed the way the “cold calling is dead” narrative implies.

Buyers are not refusing the channel. They are refusing the version of it that shows up as a single, unprepared, unfollowed-up call with nothing behind it.

That distinction matters more than the headline stat. A call that arrives with no context, no prior touch, and no plan for what happens if it goes to voicemail is a different product than a call that arrives as the third touch in a sequence a prospect has already half-recognized.

The gap between those two experiences is entirely within a program’s control, which is the part of this conversation that tends to get skipped in favor of debating the channel itself. Buyers aren’t rejecting the phone. They’re rejecting being treated as a cold list instead of a person worth a coordinated approach.

Part of what makes the “cold calling is dead” narrative so sticky is that it’s measuring the wrong thing. A raw connect rate in the low single digits looks damning in isolation, but it was never the number that mattered on its own — it’s one input into a funnel that also includes list quality, timing, and what happens after the connect.

A team that improves list quality and follow-up discipline without touching the script at all will often see the same “dead” channel start producing again, which suggests the diagnosis was wrong from the start.

What’s actually working: sequencing, not single-channel blasting

The teams still getting results from calling are not the ones dialing harder. They’re the ones who stopped treating the call as a standalone tactic. According to HubSpot’s most recent State of Cold Calling data, 73% of cold callers now combine email with their calling cadence rather than running either channel in isolation — multichannel sequencing has become the default, not the exception, among reps who are still hitting numbers.

That’s the operational shift a partner running outbound needs to be built around: a team running the calls, emails and follow-up as one coordinated sequence, not three disconnected activities reported separately and coordinated by nobody.

The gap between a program that calls and a program that sequences shows up directly in results, and it’s rarely visible from the outside until the numbers are already in.

The same shift shows up in how teams are using AI without replacing the human conversation. Scaling a program with AI support while keeping the actual conversation human is the same design principle whether the team is handling inbound service calls or outbound prospecting — AI does the preparation and the follow-up logistics; a person still has the conversation that gets a buyer to say yes.

Building the pipeline system, not just the call list

A call center is not a pipeline system, and the distinction is where most in-house outbound efforts quietly fail. Before the first dial happens, someone has to identify the right accounts, find the right contact at each one, and confirm that contact still holds the role and the company still fits the target profile — building and qualifying the list itself is a distinct discipline from making the calls, and a program that treats the two as the same job usually does both of them badly. A list built by whoever has spare time between calls is rarely the list a sequence deserves.

The downstream step matters just as much. A connected call that doesn’t convert into a scheduled, confirmed meeting on the buyer’s calendar is a wasted connect, and the handoff between “we got them on the phone” and “there’s a meeting booked” is where a surprising share of otherwise-good outbound programs lose the deal before sales ever sees it. Treating list-building, calling and appointment-setting as three separate jobs owned by three separate teams is usually where that handoff breaks down.

AI adoption inside the call itself is no longer a fringe tactic either. HubSpot’s data shows 23% of daily cold callers use AI tools extensively to prepare for calls, with another 49% using them occasionally — meaning roughly seven in ten reps who are still calling are already using some form of AI-assisted call preparation and scripting to get there, not doing it cold in the literal sense. A partner without that capability is running the version of cold calling buyers are actually tired of.

The takeaway

Cold calling isn’t dead. The version of it that ran alone, with no sequencing, no AI-assisted prep and no dedicated appointment-setting handoff, is the version that’s dying — and it was never the version that worked best in the first place.

The teams still filling pipeline from outbound in 2026 aren’t the ones who dialed the hardest. They’re the ones who rebuilt the process around what the data actually says buyers respond to, and stopped treating the phone as the whole strategy instead of one piece of it.

Talk to a specialist

Outbound built as a sequence, not a call list

Mary Pacheco, Client Services Manager at Redial BPO

Mary Pacheco

Client Services Manager · Outbound Sales

Redial’s outbound teams run calls, email and appointment setting as one coordinated sequence — ask what that looks like for your pipeline.

FAQ: Cold Calling Is Dead?

1. Is cold calling still effective for B2B sales in 2026?

Yes, though its role has shifted. Research from RAIN Group’s Center for Sales Research found that 82% of B2B buyers accept meetings at least occasionally with sellers who reach out cold, and HubSpot’s data shows most active cold callers now run it as one channel within a multichannel sequence rather than as a standalone tactic.

2. What’s the difference between cold calling and a B2B cold calling strategy?

Cold calling is a single tactic — one channel, one touch. A strategy coordinates calling with email, timing, and a clear next step (typically an appointment-setting handoff) so that a connected call has somewhere specific to go instead of ending in a one-off conversation with no follow-up plan.

3. How is AI actually being used in cold calling right now?

Primarily for preparation, not for replacing the conversation. HubSpot’s data shows 23% of daily cold callers use AI tools extensively and another 49% use them occasionally — mostly for call prep, research, and follow-up logistics, while the live conversation with the buyer stays human.

4. What should a B2B company look for in an outbound sales partner?

A partner that treats calling, email and appointment setting as one coordinated sequence rather than three separately managed activities, since the handoff between “connected” and “meeting booked” is where many otherwise-solid outbound programs lose the deal.

How to Choose Nearshore Financial Customer Service
Yessica Peña

How to Choose Nearshore Financial Customer Service

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Most nearshore RFPs still get scored the same way: whichever vendor quotes the lowest hourly rate wins the shortlist. For a financial services contact center, that scoring method misses the variable that actually determines whether the program works — coverage that matches when your customers call, not when the vendor’s office happens to be open.

A nearshore financial customer service program that saves 20% on labor and misses half the after-work call volume has not saved anything. It has moved the cost somewhere the P&L does not show it. The framework below is the one we use internally before recommending any vendor comparison to a client, and it starts by separating what a quote actually prices from what a program actually costs.

The tradeoff most RFPs get backwards

Two things get treated as separate line items in a typical vendor comparison — hourly rate and hours of coverage — when they are really the same decision made twice. A center that only covers 9-to-5 Eastern time forces a bank or lender to either staff the evening and weekend gap internally, at domestic wages, or accept that a meaningful share of billing disputes and fraud alerts sit unanswered until the next business day.

Neither option shows up in the per-hour quote, and both erase the savings the quote implied. The gap is easy to miss in a spreadsheet comparison and expensive to discover after the contract is signed.

Time zone overlap with Latin America solves this in a way offshore locations structurally cannot: agents in Mexico, Colombia or Costa Rica work the same business day as a customer in Chicago or Dallas, which means round-the-clock coverage without a fully domestic headcount becomes a realistic staffing plan rather than an aspiration.

A vendor operating three or four hours behind the customer base it serves is, in practice, running a shortened business day dressed up as full coverage.

The second variable that gets underweighted is language. Nearly 45 million people in the United States speak Spanish at home, according to the Census Bureau’s 2024 American Community Survey — a population no financial institution operating nationally can treat as a rounding error, and one that a nearshore team with genuinely bilingual agents serves without a scripted-translation workaround.

A script translated on the fly is not the same capability as an agent who can handle a dispute conversation natively, and the difference shows up first in resolution time and second in complaint volume.

What actually drives the total cost of a nearshore program

The instinct to shop on hourly rate assumes cost is the whole story, and the data on why companies outsource at all no longer supports that assumption. Deloitte’s most recent Global Outsourcing Survey found that skilled talent and agility have joined cost reduction as primary drivers of outsourcing decisions — cost alone is no longer sufficient to explain why organizations choose one partner over another, and financial services buyers in particular are weighing a partner’s ability to actually run the work, not just staff it cheaply.

That shows up directly in what a financial services program needs day to day: account servicing, billing inquiries, payment arrangements and fraud or dispute handling are not interchangeable skill sets, and a proposal that prices them as if they were is a proposal built on the wrong assumption. Fraud and dispute handling in particular carries a training and escalation-path requirement that a generalist customer service vendor without financial-sector experience will underprice in the proposal and underdeliver in production.

The lowest bid on a financial services RFP is frequently the bid that has not priced in the specialization the work actually requires, and the gap only becomes visible once the program is live and the first escalated fraud call goes to the wrong queue.

Nearshore Financial Customer Service

What to vet before you sign

Coverage and specialization are visible in a proposal. Compliance readiness is not, and it is the item most likely to surface as a problem after the contract is signed rather than before. The federal rule governing how a vendor is required to handle a customer’s financial data — the FTC’s Safeguards Rule under the Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act — puts the obligation on the financial institution to select and retain service providers capable of maintaining appropriate safeguards, and to require those safeguards by contract.

That responsibility does not transfer to the vendor. It stays with the institution regardless of who is answering the phone, which makes vendor vetting a compliance exercise as much as a procurement one.

Three questions belong in every vendor evaluation before a contract is signed: can the vendor produce evidence of a written information security program, not just a claim of compliance; does the vendor’s escalation path for a fraud or dispute call match the institution’s own risk tolerance, not a generic script; and does the vendor’s time zone and language coverage match the customer base being served, not the vendor’s own headcount map.

A partner capable of answering all three is doing more than the narrower band of processes a nearshore vendor without financial-sector depth typically runs — and the reasoning behind that gap, and why banks build dedicated call center infrastructure around it in the first place, is worth understanding before the RFP goes out.

The takeaway

The lowest quote on a nearshore financial customer service RFP is rarely the lowest total cost once coverage gaps, specialization shortfalls and compliance exposure are priced in. A partner evaluated on those three variables together, not on rate alone, is the one that actually protects the number on the business case.

Talk to a specialist

Financial services support, compliance built in

Yessica Peña, Client Services Executive at Redial BPO

Yessica Peña

Client Services Executive · Financial Services & Lending

Redial’s financial services teams handle account servicing, payment processing and arrangements, and fraud and dispute handling — staffed to match your customers’ time zone, not ours.

FAQ: How to Choose Nearshore Financial Customer Service

1. What makes financial customer service outsourcing different from general customer service outsourcing?

Financial customer service work carries regulatory obligations a general customer service program does not — most directly the FTC’s Safeguards Rule under the Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act, which requires the financial institution to vet and contractually bind any vendor handling customer financial data. It also requires fraud and dispute-handling training a generalist vendor is unlikely to have built out.

2. Is nearshore or offshore better for financial services customer service?

Nearshore locations in Latin America offer same-business-day time zone overlap with US customers, which offshore locations in Asia generally cannot match without running overnight shifts. For financial services specifically, that overlap matters more than in other verticals because fraud alerts and billing disputes are time-sensitive in a way a next-business-day response does not resolve well.

3. What should a financial institution ask a nearshore vendor before signing a contract?

Three questions matter most: whether the vendor can produce evidence of a written information security program, whether its escalation path for fraud and dispute calls matches the institution’s own risk tolerance, and whether its time zone and language coverage matches the customer base being served. A quote that does not address these has not priced the actual work.

4. How many bilingual agents does a financial services program actually need?

There is no fixed ratio, and it depends heavily on the geographic footprint of the institution’s customer base.

5. Who is responsible for data security if a nearshore vendor is handling customer information?

Under the FTC’s Safeguards Rule, the financial institution retains responsibility for ensuring its vendors maintain appropriate safeguards, even though the vendor is the one handling the day-to-day work. That responsibility is established by contract, not assumed by outsourcing the function

Eligibility verification denials
Dyamond Dickenson

Why Claim Denials Spike When Eligibility Checks Happen Too Late

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A claim gets denied three weeks after the patient already went home. The billing team pulls the file, and the reason is rarely a coding error — it’s that the patient’s coverage had lapsed, or the plan didn’t cover the service, and nobody confirmed that before the visit happened.

Eligibility verification denials get filed under “billing problem” in most practices’ internal tracking. They are, almost always, a timing problem instead. The check ran too early, too late, or only once, and by the time the claim reaches the payer, the coverage picture it was built on has already changed. The fix isn’t a better billing team. It’s a different point in the calendar.

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Where the delay actually comes from

Most practices run eligibility verification as a same-day or day-before task — sometimes at check-in, sometimes not until the claim is already queued for submission. Both are late. The window that actually prevents a denial closes well before the patient sits in the waiting room, which is why moving verification checks closer to the visit changes the outcome more than any downstream fix can.

A denial caught at submission is already a rework project — someone has to call the payer, pull the original authorization, and resubmit, often weeks after the visit that triggered it. A denial prevented at scheduling never becomes a project at all.

Three points in the scheduling-to-visit window routinely get skipped:

  • At scheduling — coverage confirmed once, weeks before the appointment, and never rechecked
  • Between scheduling and the visit — the point where a plan change, a lapsed policy, or a switched employer most often goes unnoticed
  • At check-in — the last point where a same-day correction is still possible, and the one most practices treat as the first check rather than the last one

Skipping the middle step is the single most common gap, and the national numbers show what that gap costs. Half of providers now name missing or inaccurate intake data as the leading cause of denials, up from the year before, and hospitals and health systems spent an estimated $25.7 billion in 2023 contesting claims that insurers initially denied — of which nearly $18 billion was later judged unnecessary once roughly 70% of those denials were overturned and paid anyway. That’s not a story about claims that shouldn’t have been paid. It’s a story about claims that should have been caught before submission, when the correction is a phone call instead of a three-round appeal.

This is a different failure point from the separate workflow that governs pre-treatment approval. Prior authorization catches whether a service needs pre-approval; eligibility verification catches whether coverage exists at all. Confusing the two, or assuming one covers the other, is its own source of denials — a practice can have a flawless prior authorization process and still lose the claim because nobody rechecked whether the plan was still active.

What changes when verification moves upstream

The industry’s own benchmark on administrative automation — CAQH’s 2025 Index, covering 2024 activity across more than 600 provider organizations and health plans representing 63% of insured lives — found that U.S. healthcare avoided an estimated $258 billion in administrative costs last year through electronic transactions and improved data exchange, with a further $20 billion in savings still available.

Eligibility and benefit verification sits at the center of that opportunity, because it’s the transaction that determines whether every downstream step — authorization, submission, payment — starts from accurate information or from a guess. A verification check that ran three weeks ago answers a question about the past, not about the appointment that’s about to happen.

Moving verification upstream means treating it as a recurring check tied to the appointment lifecycle, not a single task tied to the appointment date. That requires a dedicated front-end verification team with the capacity to recheck coverage between scheduling and the visit, not just at intake — catching the lapsed policy or the changed plan while there’s still time to resolve it with the patient before the appointment, rather than fighting the payer for it afterward. The difference between those two models isn’t technology. It’s whether verification is staffed as a one-time gate or an ongoing check.

Eligibility Verification Denials

What to look for in a verification workflow

The practical question for any practice evaluating its own process is whether verification happens on a schedule the payer landscape actually requires, not one that’s convenient for staffing. A workflow built to catch late-stage coverage changes needs a recheck cadence between scheduling and the visit, a process for surfacing discrepancies to front-desk staff before the patient arrives rather than after the claim is denied, and enough capacity that rechecking doesn’t get quietly dropped when a practice gets busy — which is exactly when it matters most, because busy scheduling weeks are also weeks with the highest volume of plan changes going unnoticed.

The metrics that actually predict a denial are worth tracking separately from general claims KPIs: first-pass eligibility accuracy, the share of appointments rechecked within 72 hours of the visit, and the lag between a coverage change and when it’s caught. A practice that can’t answer those three questions is flying blind on the exact variable that drives its denial rate, no matter how well it performs on coding accuracy or clean-claim submission further down the pipeline.

The takeaway

Denials filed as billing errors are, more often, verification errors — specifically, verification that happened too early or not at all between scheduling and the visit. Providers who move that check into the middle of the scheduling window, instead of treating it as a same-day formality, are the ones keeping their share of that $18 billion out of the wasted column. That shift in timing is close to our work across the insurance sector — building verification into a cadence a practice’s calendar actually supports, not a single checkbox.

Talk to a specialist

Eligibility verification, run as a cadence

Dyamond Dickenson, Client Services Executive at Redial BPO

Dyamond Dickenson

Client Services Executive · Healthcare

Redial’s healthcare teams handle eligibility and benefits verification, prior authorization support, and billing and claims inquiries — rechecking coverage between scheduling and the visit, not just at intake.

FAQ: Eligibility Verification Denials: Why Timing Matters.

1. What is eligibility verification and why does timing matter?

Eligibility verification confirms a patient’s active insurance coverage and benefits before a service is billed. Timing matters because coverage can change between when an appointment is scheduled and when it happens — a single check done too early, or only at check-in, misses that window and leads directly to denials that could have been caught earlier.

2. What causes most healthcare claim denials?

Missing or inaccurate data collected at patient intake is the most commonly cited cause, according to more than half of providers surveyed in Experian Health’s 2025 State of Claims report — ahead of coding errors or documentation issues. A large share of that inaccurate data traces back to coverage that was confirmed too early and never rechecked.

3. How much does claim denial rework actually cost providers?

Hospitals and health systems spent an estimated $25.7 billion in 2023 contesting denied claims, and roughly $18 billion of that was later judged unnecessary because most of those claims were eventually overturned and paid (Premier Inc.). That cost sits almost entirely on the provider side of the ledger.

4. Is eligibility verification the same as prior authorization?

No. Eligibility verification confirms that coverage is active and what it includes; prior authorization is a separate approval a payer requires before certain services are delivered. Both can prevent denials, but they operate at different points in the workflow and fail for different reasons.

5. How often should eligibility be rechecked before a visit?

There is no single mandated cadence, but the practices seeing the fewest denials treat it as at least two checkpoints — once at scheduling and once shortly before the visit — rather than a single check at either end.

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