The lender's problem was not volume. It was one email, in which a well-meaning agent told a borrower a penalty would be waived - and the internal auditors asking how many others there had been.
The starting position
Customer service ran from a shared Microsoft 365 mailbox. The policy said replies involving waivers, foreclosure figures or settlements must be checked by a team lead. In practice that meant forwarding a draft and waiting, and under pressure, agents sometimes did not.
The audit asked for a list of every customer email that had mentioned a waiver in the previous year, and who had checked each one. Producing it took two people most of a fortnight, and the answer was not comfortable.
What they set up
The desk moved to SupaDesk with the same mailbox. Operations wrote four communication policies in the first week.
- Any reply containing waiver, foreclosure, settlement or NOC requires approval by a team lead.
- Every reply by an agent in their first 30 days requires approval.
- Any reply with an attachment requires approval.
- Replies on the Grievance category need two approvals: team lead, then the nodal officer.
What the first month got wrong
The keyword list was too broad. "Settlement" matched routine messages about payment settlement dates, and for two weeks a third of all replies waited for approval. Team leads became a bottleneck and the SLA report showed it - waiting on approval keeps the clock running, by design.
The fix was narrower phrases and a category condition, which brought the share of held replies down to about 14%.
The result
Since go-live, no reply mentioning a waiver has left without approval, and each approval carries the approver, the time and the IP address. The follow-up audit asked for the same list; it was produced from a report in an afternoon.
Median approval time settled at 38 minutes during business hours. First-response attainment dipped for a month and then recovered to above where it had been.