Quicken is a leading personal finance software company that has helped individuals manage their finances for over 30 years. Serving nearly 3 million customers, primarily in the U.S, Quicken enables users to track spending, budgeting, investments, and financial goals across multiple institutions.
Challenges
High seasonal call volumes and a legacy IVR created a negative experience for a customer base who resisted new technology and preferred the phone
Solution
An AI agent that provides frictionless support and answers FAQs for customers while accurately routing to and assisting agents when calls have to be escalated
Result
Quicken’s containment rate has now quadrupled since launching PolyAI, with 2,500 calls resolved daily and not a single customer complaint
Challenge
Quicken has built its reputation on helping individuals achieve and maintain financial health. However, the company found itself facing critical operational and demographic challenges in its customer service function.
One of the most pressing challenges stemmed from the highly seasonal nature of Quicken’s support operations. While they typically staff around 200 agents, call volumes surge dramatically around year-end—often requiring over 300 agents to handle upward of 12,000 calls per week. This fluctuation made staffing complex and costly, especially given the legacy IVR systems in place, which relied on outdated call routing menus that often sent users to the wrong support lines, exacerbating wait times and frustration.
Additionally, Quicken’s core customer base, largely made up of Baby Boomers and Gen X, have traditionally been resistant to technological change. Before implementing PolyAI, every single customer call was handled by a human agent. This meant that even straightforward requests like password resets or refund queries tied up valuable agent time. Quicken needed to find a scalable, customer-first solution that performed as well as a human.
"At first there was pushback internally that this wouldn't work. Knowing that our customer base was more mature, we needed to be sure a solution like this could be a benefit to them."
Solution
From the outset, Quicken evaluated AI vendors with a focus on trust, transparency, and strategic alignment. Anything introduced into the customer experience had to be genuinely helpful and never obstructive. PolyAI stood out not only because of its robust voice AI technology, but because of its willingness to collaborate closely and co-own the outcome.
Quicken’s AI agent, named Lisa, was designed to provide frictionless and transparent support to callers. Rather than replacing agents, Lisa handles repetitive queries, such as refund requests and step-by-step product troubleshooting, while seamlessly transferring more complex or sensitive calls to live agents. This accurate routing is essential for both customer satisfaction and agent efficiency. Lisa clearly introduces herself as a digital assistant, setting the right expectations upfront with customers and offering a smooth handoff when needed.
Beyond customer experience, Quicken and PolyAI have also worked together to improve agent satisfaction and efficiency. The AI agent integrates into the agent desktop to automatically surface relevant customer information, pre-fill CRM fields, and suggest appropriate responses all while the agent focuses solely on the conversation. Agents should focus on providing a warm and productive customer experience, not be distracted scribbling down notes.
This dual-pronged approach, supporting both customers and agents, has created a more seamless and efficient experience across the board.
Results
Call containment
Daily resolved calls
Customer complaints since launch
Since deploying PolyAI, Quicken has seen positive results. With a focus on careful expansion, their call containment rate has grown from 5% at launch to 21% a year later, meaning more than one in five customer calls are now fully resolved by the AI assistant without needing human intervention. Quicken is targeting beyond 30% within the next year, progress they didn’t envision when this project was kicked off.
Lisa engages with every caller, amounting to hundreds of thousands of interactions and up to 2,500 calls per day during peak seasons. Customers appreciate the ease and speed of getting simple tasks resolved, while agents benefit from lower call volumes and better-prepared conversations. The agent assist tools have also increased their efficiency and job satisfaction, reducing attrition rates.
“Lisa, our AI agent, is a representative of Quicken. She represents Quicken as much as I do. ”
Future Plans
Looking ahead, Quicken’s roadmap with PolyAI includes deepening agent enablement through further automation and real-time guidance. The long-term vision is to train new agents more effectively by offloading technical complexity to AI, allowing them to focus on human connection.
Quicken is also working with PolyAI to deploy multilingual support, increased self-service sophistication, and additionally complex use cases like cancellations and renewals.
“ Implementing PolyAI has upped the game. When I have somebody else from another industry call me and ask me how we are doing it the right way, who could ask for more?”
