We work with many clients who are moving their contact center platform to the cloud solutions offered by their CCaaS providers, many of which offer a secure IVR payment solution, either as part of self-service or agent-assisted interactions. This solution is designed to de-scope contact center environments from PCI DSS.
Often this secure IVR payment solution is available to the CCaaS customers as part of the package of solutions that they’re paying for. However, there are some significant differences between such solutions and CardEasy Agent Assist, particularly if you are focussed on providing your customers with an exceptional and seamless experience, including the payment stage of your interactions.
CCaaS payment solutions require contact center agents to transfer customers to a self-service IVR at the point of payment
This means that the agent and the customer are disconnected and the only way that the customer can be given payment instructions is through the use of pre-recorded voice prompts for both DTMF and speech recognition capture methods.
If a customer is confused by the pre-recorded instructions or runs into any kind of problem at all whilst trying to make a payment, the agent to whom they were originally speaking cannot help them. The customer and the agent are completely disconnected at the point at which the agent transfers the customer to the IVR payment system.
From the customer’s point of view, this is a very poor experience. They cannot ask the agent any questions during the process of making their payment. They cannot get any help if anything goes wrong during the payment process.
The agent is not able to assist the customer with any issues or questions as they are no longer connected. Additionally, the agent has no visibility of whether the customer has completed the payment or not, so cannot step in proactively in the event of a problem or assist the customer if they see that a payment hasn’t gone through.
This leads to a high number of abandoned payments and offers a poor customer experience
We know from our clients’ experience that, in most cases, a payment solution which requires agents to transfer customers to IVR, results in a high number of abandoned payments. Customers do not always understand the recorded instructions and generally prefer to make payment while connected to the agent. If the option to get help from a live agent is not available, the customer is much more likely to abandon the payment, which costs your business money.
If the customer experiences an issue or has a question whilst making their payment, they would have to be routed back to the contact center at which point they would be connected to a different agent. This is a poor customer experience and an extremely inefficient way of managing this process.
The only way of guaranteeing that the customer can be routed back to the same agent is if the agent is placed on hold at the point at which the customer is routed to the IVR payment system and stays on hold until the payment is completed. Obviously, placing agents on hold like this prevents them from assisting other customers during this time and significantly increases average call handling times.
No way of taking payment in the event of problems with the IVR
If a customer experiences a problem with the IVR, even if they’re able to talk to the agent, the agent then has no option but to refer them back into the IVR to try once again to make their payment. This can lead to a vicious circle with customers being transferred from IVR back to agents and then back to the IVR, which also increases average call handling time and massively increases the chances of the payment ultimately being abandoned.
Using CardEasy the agent and the customer remain connected throughout the payment process
With CardEasy Agent Assist, the customer and the agent remain connected throughout the payment process. There is no need to transfer the customer to an self-service IVR and so the agent can provide them with any assistance that they require during the payment process. There are no pre-recorded messages – instead the agent can verbally prompt the customer to either type or speak their card numbers (but without the agent or your contact center being exposed to payment card numbers at any point during the process).
As the customer and the agent remain connected, the agent can guide the customer through the process and provide real-time assistance as required. This results in a much higher payment success rate and much better experience for the customer.
Additionally, the agent has real-time visibility of the customer completing the payment process. CardEasy Agent Assist provides the agent with a payment page, which can be fully integrated with the agent’s normal workflow, and provides the agent with a real-time display showing the card data being captured from the customer by CardEasy, with card data redacted in real-time, so the agent can step in if there’s a problem.
Utilizing a ‘free’ option is a false economy
It can be tempting to wonder why you should pay for CardEasy Agent Assist when other options exist that are ‘free’ or wrapped up in a license fee. But the key thing to remember here is that they’re not similar – CardEasy offers an exceptional customer experience along with reduced call handling times and numbers of abandoned payments.
Utilizing an apparently free option ultimately costs way more in terms of abandoned payments, higher call handling times and poor customer experience than a market leading and fully featured solution like CardEasy would have cost in the first place.
