Avant's AI Virtual Agent Handles 62% of Customer Service Calls Without Human Transfer
Avant, a financial technology company, deployed an AI-powered virtual agent across its credit card customer service operation in January 2026. Built with Replicant's conversational AI platform, the system completes roughly two-thirds of inbound calls without escalating to a human agent.
Customers rated the virtual agent 4.6 out of 5 in post-call surveys since launch. The system now generates structured data from every conversation, giving Avant's teams clearer insight into what customers need and where service gaps exist.
How the System Works
The virtual agent was built around five operational principles:
- Always-on availability
- Routing routine work away from human specialists
- Capturing structured data from interactions
- Scaling instantly during demand spikes
- Delivering consistent, compliant communication across every call
High-volume, repetitive requests now route to the AI agent first. This frees Avant's customer service team to focus on conversations requiring judgment and empathy-the work that defines customer relationships.
What Changes for Customer Service Teams
The shift addresses a persistent pain point in customer support: handling unexpected volume surges without hiring temporary staff or burning out existing teams. The virtual agent scales to demand automatically.
Margaret Hermes, Avant's Chief Operating Officer, said: "Our goal is to build a more responsive operation where AI handles complexity at scale, our talented team of customer service human specialists focuses on the work that demands judgment and empathy, and the entire system generates better intelligence about customer needs over time."
The feedback loop created by structured call data is difficult to achieve with human-handled calls alone. Machine-readable interaction patterns reveal trends that individual conversations might miss.
What's Next
Avant plans to expand the virtual agent to additional customer support operations beyond the current credit card deployment. The company serves more than 4 million customers and has issued over 2.9 million credit cards since 2017.
For customer support professionals, this deployment signals a broader shift: AI handles the volume; humans handle the nuance. Understanding how to work alongside these systems is becoming part of the job. Learn more about AI for Customer Support and AI Agents & Automation.
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