How One Fintech Giant Saved $2M/Year
When a major fintech company rolled out an AI-powered contact center platform, they did everything right on the technology side.
The platform was solid. The vendor was experienced. The implementation timeline was reasonable. And the potential ROI (e.g. faster handle times, better customer satisfaction, lower operating costs) was real and measurable.
What didn't exist was any infrastructure to help the people using it actually change how they worked.
No communication plan. No stakeholder alignment framework. No internal champions. No roadmap for what agents, team leads, and managers were supposed to do differently on Day 1, Week 2, or Month 3.
Just a new platform, a training session, and an expectation that adoption would follow.
It's one of the most common setups I walk into. And left unaddressed, it almost always ends the same way: the technology works, the adoption doesn't, and twelve months later everyone is debating whether they bought the wrong platform.
The platform wasn't the problem.
What We Found
When I came in, the first thing I did was listen.
I mapped every stakeholder group from frontline agents, team leads, operations managers, and senior leadership, and asked the same core questions: What do you know about this change? What are you worried about? What would need to be true for this to feel like a success?
The answers were consistent across groups, and they weren't surprising.
Frontline agents didn't understand why the platform was being introduced and they feared it was going to replace them. The message they'd received was essentially "new tool, mandatory, go-live is in six weeks." Team leads were being asked to reinforce adoption, but hadn't been given any structure for how to do that. Operations managers were focused on milestone delivery, not behavior change. And senior leadership assumed that because training had been scheduled, readiness was covered.
There was no villain in this story. Everyone was doing their job. Nobody had been given the job of making sure the change actually landed.
That's the gap I was there to close.
What We Built
Over the next several months, we built the change management infrastructure from the ground up, working inside the existing implementation timeline, not around it.
Stakeholder alignment first. Before anything else, we got leadership aligned on a single, clear narrative: why this platform, why now, and what it meant for the people using it every day. Not the business case language. The human language. The kind that actually travels down through an organization and arrives intact.
A champion network inside the team. We identified change agents and team leads who were early adopters. People who engaged positively with the platform in early testing and who had credibility with their peers. We gave them a name, a structure, and a role: to be the human bridge between the change and the people going through it.
Communication that met people where they were. We redesigned the communication cadence so it wasn't just announcement-style updates from leadership. It addressed what agents actually cared about, what would be harder at first, what support was available, and what success was going to look like for them specifically.
A 90-day post-go-live reinforcement plan. This is the piece most implementations skip entirely. We built it before launch: checkpoints, adoption metrics, escalation paths, and a rhythm of recognition for teams hitting adoption milestones. The goal was to make sure the change kept moving forward after the implementation team moved on.
What Happened
Three months after go-live:
↑ 5% increase in CSAT
↓ 15% reduction in average handle time
↑ 10% improvement in first contact resolution
💰 $2M+ in annual operating costs saved
Those numbers came from the platform working as designed because people were actually using it as designed.
The technology didn't change between the start of the engagement and the end. What changed was whether the people using it understood why it mattered, felt supported through the transition, and had someone reinforcing the new behavior long enough for it to become habit.
What This Means for Your Organization
If you're heading into a major platform rollout, (e.g. AI, CRM, ERP, or anything else that changes how your teams work day-to-day) the ROI projections in your business case are based on full adoption. Not 40% adoption. Not 60%. Full adoption.
Every percentage point of adoption you don't hit is value left on the table.
The organizations that consistently close that gap don't have better technology or bigger budgets. They have change management infrastructure built before go-live, not scrambled together after adoption starts slipping.
That infrastructure doesn't have to be complicated. But it does have to exist.
Marissa Moretti is the Founder of EngageWise Partners and a Prosci ADKAR®-certified change management consultant. She works with mid-to-large enterprises navigating technology implementations and operational transformations — helping them get to 85%+ adoption within 90 days of go-live.
If your organization is heading into a major transformation, she's happy to talk through what change-ready looks like for your specific situation.
📩 marissa@engagewisepartners.com