Radiant Credit Union Scales from $500M to $800M Without Expanding Contact Center

When Eric Whisler joined Radiant in 2021 as AVP, Contact Center, the credit union was at an inflection point. Growth was accelerating and member expectations were rising, but the contact center’s toolset – a push-button IVR, a basic website chatbot that came with their live chat vendor, and no after-hours support – wasn’t built for where Radiant was headed.

The website chatbot handled only a handful of FAQs before routing members to agents or to email after hours. The phone banking system was approaching end-of life, with a planned e-banking conversion and phone-system migration on the horizon. The IVR compounded the problem – a push-button system requiring members to navigate multiple menu layers before reaching the right department.

With no after-hours self-service and an aggressive expansion underway – new counties, new branches, a merger on the horizon – the contact center faced growing demand it couldn’t meet through hiring alone.

What Radiant was up against:

• A push-button IVR forcing members through deep menu trees before reaching help
• A self-built website chatbot with almost no real containment capability
• After-hours service limited to voicemail. 30-40 messages waiting every morning
• A planned e-banking conversion and phone-system migration
• A growth target ($500M → $1B in assets) that couldn’t be staffed the traditional way

By March 2026, Ray was handling 31,700 calls per month. In that same month, over 7,000 of those calls came in after hours – members calling outside business hours, knowing Ray would answer. Chat AI ran in parallel, handling 2,352 web conversations in March 2026 alone, with 77,000+ total since launching in December 2022. The operational impact was immediate and sustained.

1. Growth without headcount
Radiant Credit Union’s assets grew from roughly $500 million when Eric joined to $800 million today – a 60% increase – without adding to the contact center team. Leadership estimates automation absorbed the workload of roughly four full-time agents, deflecting ~25% of what would otherwise have become hiring pressure.

2. Industry-leading containment – with context 
Radiant Credit Union has maintained strong call containment since launch, historically containing more than 70% of inbound calls without agent involvement. For members, that means faster answers around the clock. For the contact center, it means agents spend their time on interactions that actually need a human – not routine balance checks and transaction history requests. Current containment sits at 67% following a recent feature rollout, with the team actively working to push to 70%+ automation.

3. Genuine 24/7 service – and new demand, not just deflection
Before Ray, members who called after hours got a voicemail box. Morning queues ran 30–40 messages every day; overnight email backlogs were similar. Both have dropped to a handful.

Today, Ray handles 7,000+ after-hours calls per month – and has handled more than 192,000 after-hours calls since going live in September 2023. Average call handling time sits at 57.9 seconds.

But the bigger signal isn’t deflection – it’s expansion. After-hours call volume is up an estimated 30-40% since Ray launched. Members aren’t just routing existing calls differently; they’re calling at hours they never would have before, because they now trust that Ray will help them.

Another proof point that members are taking a liking to Ray is when Ray went down.

“When Ray went down during the Amazon outage, we got more compliments about Ray than we’d ever received. Members were asking, ‘Where’s Ray? Why am I talking to you?’ That was the moment we knew adoption had really taken hold – especially among the members who pushed back hardest at the start.”

4. Chat AI: Web self-service that runs itself

When Radiant Credit Union deployed Chat AI, the goal was simple: give members a web channel that could actually answer questions. It’s now handled 77,000+ conversations since December 2022 – 2,352 in March 2026 alone.

What’s kept it performing is how little effort it takes to maintain. Chat AI automatically scrapes Radiant’s website and documentation to stay current – when rates change, new products launch, or policies update, the AI finds it. The team doesn’t build or update intents manually. Accurate, up-to-date answers are available to members without any manual intervention from the team.

WHAT’S NEXT

From $800M to $1B on the same operating platform

On June 1, 2026, Radiant Credit Union merged membership with First Coast Community Credit Union, pushing combined assets past the billion-dollar mark. First Coast’s members are accustomed to branch heavy, in-person service and have had historically low digital self service adoption.

The merger is where Radiant expects to expand the team – but only slightly. Rather than staffing up to absorb First Coast’s members, the plan is to scale Ray to contain the routine transactional calls and add just a handful of agents for the more complex membership interactions. interface.ai is porting First Coast’s phone number onto the AI agent deployment and working with Radiant on a guided onboarding experience: Ray fields calls from new members, contains what it can, and hands off the rest with context so agents can coach members into the self-service habit.

If all goes to plan, Radiant will cross $1 billion in assets with only a modest addition to the contact-center footprint it runs today.