Challenge: Spire, a pay-by-bank fintech, struggled with their support team resolving complex inquiries across many categories by hand. Their branched workflows and heavy documentation drove long resolution times and rising costs as volume grew.
Solution: Qurrent deployed a fully managed digital workforce, integrated with Zendesk and Spire’s native platform, that owns the support process end-to-end from ticket intake through diagnosis and resolution.
Results:
80% of targeted email tickets resolved without human intervention
Resolution time cut from hours or days to minutes
Consistent policy compliance maintained across thousands of tickets
55,000+ merchant locations supported on the Pay with Spire network
The challenge
Branched workflows across every support category
Spire's support team resolves customer inquiries across a wide span of categories, including enrollment, bank changes, account and payment-method updates, returns, suspected fraud, missing discounts, and trouble completing a transaction.
Each of those categories previously carried its own branched workflow and its own documentation, and a team member often had to move through several steps and reference materials before landing on the right resolution.
Support cost grew with the customer base
Spire supports many merchant partners and the consumers who pay through them, and the rules shift by brand. The correct answer to the same type of question can differ from one partner to the next.
Team members had to hold all of that nuance in their heads and apply it consistently, which is difficult to sustain across thousands of tickets and a growing roster of partners. The result was resolution times that ran long, sometimes hours or days, and a support cost that climbed in step with volume.
That cost dynamic mattered more for Spire than it would for most companies.
Spire's whole value to merchants rests on driving down the cost of a transaction, so a support function that scaled linearly with its consumer base pulled against the economics the company is built to protect.
To keep growing without that drag, Spire needed to automate the support process itself, bring resolution times down, and hold support costs flat as the customer base expanded.
The solution
Qurrent deployed a custom digital workforce wired into Spire's existing systems, including Zendesk and the native Spire platform, with no rebuild of the underlying stack.
Rather than giving agents a faster tool, a digital workforce took over the support process.
The digital workers pick up tickets on their own, diagnose the customer's issue against Spire's procedures, and carry out the steps needed to resolve it, escalating only the cases that fall outside their guardrails.
Spire's support, risk, and operations teams set the policies and kept oversight while the workforce handled execution, so the people who understood the business stayed in control of how it ran.
The digital workforce
The digital workers own the support process from intake to resolution rather than assisting a human through it.
An incoming ticket is classified, worked against Spire's documented procedures for that category and that merchant partner, and resolved inside Spire's own systems.
The high-volume, repetitive categories that consumed the bulk of the team's time now run without a person involved, and anything that falls outside the defined guardrails routes to a human with the context already gathered.
That division of labor is what lets the same support function absorb more volume without a matching rise in headcount.
Qurrent Operating System
The workforce runs on the Qurrent Operating System, which handles orchestration, observability, and performance management across the agents.
Every action the workforce takes is logged and reviewable, so Spire is never trading visibility for automation.
The team can see how the workforce is performing against its targets, audit how any individual ticket was handled, and manage the workforce the way it would manage a team.
Because the policies live in the system rather than in any given individual’s memory, the workforce holds to them consistently without the continual retraining a human support group needs to stay aligned as rules change.
The result
Resolution in minutes, held to policy
Across the automated categories, more than 80% of targeted email tickets now resolve without a person touching them.
Tickets that used to wait hours or days for a human to pick them up are closed in seconds or minutes, which changes the experience for the customer waiting on the other end.
And because the policies are enforced by the system, the workforce applies Spire's rules consistently across thousands of tickets, holding a level of compliance that a human team needs ongoing training and supervision to match.
Room to grow without adding headcount
The effect on the team is as important as the speed.
With the repetitive volume absorbed, Spire's support staff spend their time on the cases that actually need human judgment instead of working through routine tickets one at a time.
That lets Spire grow its consumer base without growing support headcount at the same rate, which is the outcome the cost structure depends on.
The workforce has become a core part of how the company plans to scale while keeping the support experience strong.
Qurrent's digital workforce is a game-changer by drastically shortening resolution times from days to minutes while increasing our first contact resolution rate, all without human intervention. It enables us to achieve significant efficiency while delivering a stellar customer experience.
Ben Rhodes, SVP Strategy and Operations, Spire
About
Spire lowers transaction processing costs for merchants while helping them drive loyalty through customer rewards. Its Pay with Spire product runs on the Discover Network to deliver a merchant-branded ACH payment option at the point of sale with no integration required, working across point-of-sale systems, digital wallets, in-app purchases, and online checkout.
Pay with Spire reduces merchant processing costs by 50 to 90% across more than 55,000 merchant locations while giving consumers a bank-linked payment experience with credit-card-style rewards. Spire traces its origins to the ACH payment solution selected for the Merchant Customer Exchange (MCX) and is building on that work with the next step for pay by bank at the point of sale.
See what a digital workforce could run for you
Contact us to see how a Qurrent digital workforce could run your operations end-to-end.
