Rising Costs, Rising Demand: How the Right Contact Centre Solution Can Support Scaling Collections Operations Without Scaling Overheads

In April 2025, UK businesses faced another wave of operational cost increases, hitting customer service and collections operations particularly hard. 

At the same time, consumer debt volumes were rising, placing even greater pressure on contact centres to do more with less.

For collections teams, the challenge is clear: increase engagement, improve recoveries and handle growing account volumes, without proportionally increasing headcount, office space or operational spend.

This is where the right technology strategy becomes critical.

The cost pressures facing contact centres in 2025 – 2026

Several major changes have contributed to the increased cost of running contact centre operations:

• Employers’ National Insurance contributions increased from 13.8% to 15% – an 8.7% rise
• The earnings threshold at which employers begin paying NICs has been reduced from £9,100 to £5,000 per annum
• Office property business rates are expected to rise by approximately 6 – 14% since April 2026
• Energy prices remain around 70 – 75% above pre-2021 levels

Combined, these increases mean the cost of employing agents, and simply providing them with a working environment, has risen significantly over the last 12 months, with little indication of relief ahead.

At the same time, financial pressures on UK consumers continue to intensify. 

Cost-of-living challenges, slower hiring activity and wage suppression are contributing to rising debt volumes, increasing demand for collections operations just as operational costs surge.

Consumer finance demand also continues to rise, increasing by 5% in February 2026, while defaults on lending have reached a two-year high.

For collections businesses, this creates a difficult balancing act to:

• Handle more accounts
• Increase engagement and recovery rates
• Control operating costs
• Avoid large-scale recruitment expansion

The new reality: Achieve more with less

Modern collections operations need to become leaner, smarter and more automated.

That means:

• Increasing the ratio of accounts and calls per agent
• Driving higher engagement and Right Party Contact (RPC) rates
• Automating repetitive workflows
• Reducing dependency on manual processes
• Minimising office space and energy consumption
• Scaling operations without expanding physical infrastructure
• Improving agent productivity and effectiveness

Technology is no longer just an operational tool; it has become a cost-control strategy.

How TCN helps contact centres offset rising costs

TCN’s unified Operator platform has been designed specifically to help organisations meet these pressures head-on.

Rather than relying on disconnected systems and multiple vendors, businesses can centralise automation, workforce optimisation, dialling, AI and engagement tools within a single platform.

SmartAMD: Reduce wasted call time and improve RPCs

TCN’s AI-powered Smart Answering Machine Detection (AMD) helps contact centres significantly reduce wasted minutes spent on non-productive calls.

By identifying answering machines more effectively, agents spend more time speaking with real customers and less time navigating dead air or voicemail connections.

The result:

• Higher RPC rates
• Better agent utilisation
• Reduced operational waste
• Improved campaign efficiency

Virtual Agents: Automate repetitive agent tasks

AI-powered bots can act as virtual agents that handle repetitive, time-consuming processes that traditionally consume agent capacity.

This allows organisations to:

• Reduce manual workloads
• Lower staffing requirements
• Improve consistency
• Increase operational scalability
• Free agents to focus on higher-value customer interactions

As labour costs continue to rise, automation becomes one of the most effective ways to protect margins.

Workforce Optimisation (WFO): Improve productivity and QA efficiency

TCN’s Workforce Optimisation tool helps automate quality assurance processes and improve agent development.

Benefits include:

• Reduced QA administration overhead
• Faster identification of coaching opportunities
• Improved compliance monitoring
• More effective agent training
• Increased productivity across teams

Better-performing agents generate stronger outcomes without increasing headcount.

Workforce Management (WFM): Smarter forecasting and scheduling

Workforce Management tools help contact centres maximise efficiency from existing teams through:

• Smarter forecasting
• Intelligent scheduling
• Better resource allocation
• Reduced overstaffing
• Lower staff churn

In a high-cost labour market, optimising workforce utilisation has become essential.

Real results: CCS Collect case study

One of TCN’s UK debt collections clients, CCS Collect, has already seen measurable improvements after moving from its previous dialler platform to TCN.

Since implementing the TCN platform, CCS Collect has tracked improvements across:

• Connection rates
• Right party contacts (RPCs)
• Collections performance
• Operational efficiency metrics

Their results have been pleasing across the board, and they cite the following since implementing TCN:

Inbound performance

• The percentage of abandoned calls has decreased by 48%
• Average wait times have significantly reduced by 87%
• Notably, CCS says these improvements have been achieved without utilising any concierge functionality that needed to be deployed in the previous solution.

Outbound performance

Comparing outbound performance across different diallers is not entirely like-for-like, however, with a comparison between the previous solution and TCN’s Blast and Predictive dialling, the improvements are clear:

• CCS has increased dial volumes by 187%, exceeding 700k total dials in March 2026
• The Outbound RPC conversion rate has improved by 75%

CCS is continuing to monitor performance data, with all major measures currently trending positively compared to its previous solution.

This demonstrates a critical point for collections operations in 2026:

Technology investment is no longer just about innovation – it is about protecting profitability while scaling sustainably. One unified platform. Zero professional services costs. Most organisations looking to modernise their operations face another major concern: implementation costs.

TCN removes that barrier.

Unlike many providers, TCN does not charge professional services fees to transfer onto the platform, eliminating a significant upfront cost typically associated with large-scale technology migration projects.

That means organisations can:

• Modernise without major capital expenditure
• Scale at lower operational cost
• Improve margins faster
• Consolidate technology vendors
• Future-proof collections operations

The message for contact centres in 2026

The pressure on collections and customer service operations is not easing.

Operating costs are rising, debt volumes are increasing, customers expect faster engagement and margins are tightening. Businesses that continue relying on labour-heavy operating models will struggle to scale profitably.

The organisations that succeed will be those that:

• Automate intelligently
• Maximise agent productivity
• Consolidate technology
• Reduce wasted operational spend
• Scale efficiently

TCN’s unified platform, Operator, provides all of these capabilities under one technologically advanced, yet intuitive and easily accessible roof.

Use TCN to offset the increased costs of running your business, scale at a lower cost and improve your margins.Contact our UK team for a demo or a no-obligation discussion at salesuk@tcn.com or +44 (0) 204-600-0000.