Artificial intelligence (AI) is undoubtedly reshaping the digital payments ecosystem in every industry. Is your organization prepared for this wave of digital transformation? Two of the ways that you can capitalize on the surge of automated payment systems are through switching on AI-powered payments via chatbot payments and voicebot payments.
At-a-glance benefits of AI payment solutions
Whether your organization uses (or is looking into using) chatbots, voicebots, or a combination of the two, there are a handful of benefits that emerge from AI payment integrations.
- Enhanced analytics and insights
AI is a powerful tool for sourcing real-time data and analytics, providing insights that might not be surfaced easily from legacy technologies or human intuition. AI can ingest data from many disparate sources, process and visualize trends, and present useful information to improve sales and marketing effectiveness, customer retention, support and service activities, as well as provide valuable direction and data for research and development. - By enabling AI-powered payments within your chatbot and voicebot capabilities, your brand is empowered to unlock valuable data and insights on customer payment behavior to identify trends, optimize payment processes, and make informed business decisions.
- Improved conversion rates
Payment-enabling your chatbots and voicebots removes the need for your customers to navigate to a separate channel to make a payment, resulting in reduced drop-offs in the payment process, leading to higher conversion rates and increased sales. - A better customer experience
Let’s say you have a customer who is making a payment via chatbot or voicebot. If this customer has a payment-related question or issue during the transaction, they can directly communicate with the voicebot or chatbot within the current conversation, enabling quicker response times, more efficient issue resolution, and improved customer support. And if they require more complex assistance, the chatbot or voicebot can easily reroute them to speak to a live agent. - Multi-device accessibility
Your customers are empowered to pay by link from various devices – whether they’re on desktop or a mobile phone – customers can conveniently complete digital payments at home, work, or on the go, by speaking with a voicebot or having a digital conversation with a chatbot.
Payment-enable your digital channels 24/7 with AI chatbots
Through 24/7 digital conversations, AI chatbots have the power to enhance your CX by delivering information to your customers that make it easy to get recommendations and advice on increasingly complex products and services. While AI chatbots can quickly answer FAQs, resolve customer complaints, or book appointments with sales teams or customer support representatives, did you know that AI chatbots also have the capability to be a vital part of a customer’s digital payment journey?
These dynamic AI chatbots are capable of handling secure payments, purchases, and returns on the go, at any time of day – paving the way to a more automated and predictable revenue collection for your brand. The opportunity is only growing exponentially, with worldwide spending on chatbots set to increase by a whopping 470% over 5 years, growing to $72 billion USD by 2028.
AI chatbots help to increase sales, boost brand loyalty, and cut operational costs, all while freeing up your customer support agents to focus on the activities that will have the biggest impact. And with the opportunity to reduce your customer service costs by up to 30%, enabling secure chatbot payments is an opportunity you can’t afford to pass up.
The powerful potential of AI in voice calls
Just like in channels such as chat that we explored above, AI has the power to significantly improve your contact center’s bottom line when implemented with voice calls. In the financial services industry, for example, average call duration, wait times, and call abandonment are trending upwards – all of which negatively impact overall customer satisfaction. Integrating AI in your voice streams can reduce average call duration, freeing up your live agents’ valuable time.
During phone interactions between a customer and a live agent, time is often wasted by an agent needing to utilize multiple applications and screens to complete tasks, ultimately increasing the call duration. Contact center agents in the financial services industry, for example, use numerous applications for a single interaction: an average of just under 5 during a call, and just over 3 after a call. AI has the ability to assist agents in navigating between these many applications during a call, ensuring that they have quick information and triggered suggestions at their fingertips, and customer data is correctly tracked in multiple systems. Further, AI can reduce the time it takes for an agent to manually type in information, by identifying key information and automatically populating forms, remembering customer preferences, and catching and correcting errors in real time.
Another bottleneck affecting call duration is repetition due to mishearing. Audio quality and background noise can often cause customers and agents to mishear each other, meaning that more time is wasted by repeating information. AI applications can effectively reduce or remove background noise, both in real-time and in call recordings. Not only does this reduce call duration overall, it also reduces the amount of money spent on upgrading headsets and other agent equipment.
Excessive call duration and the domino effect of long wait times can often lead to call abandonment and poor customer experience. Customers often cite short call wait times and high first contact resolution (FCR) rates as some of the top reasons for positive customer experience. In addition to being able to improve call duration, AI also has the capability to reduce wait times for calls deemed more urgent. By gathering and assessing data before the call has even been routed, AI can accurately prioritize more pressing calls in the queue first.
Conversational AI technology can also be used to supplement a live agent’s people management skillset and get ahead of potential customer conflicts. This is achieved by identifying customer sentiment based on the tone of their voice and language patterns. If a customer sounds frustrated, they can be routed to an experienced agent for immediate assistance.
Unlock conversational commerce with voicebots
Another critical way that AI can be incorporated into your voice streams is through the use of voicebots. With voicebots, customers have the opportunity to manage their account, preferences, or steps in the payment journey such as paying a bill, obtaining their credit score, and gaining real-time insight on their account balance. Additionally, secure voicebot payments can be configured to remove the need to enter a PIN or password in order to authenticate the customer’s identity. This streamlines and accelerates the payment process, creating a faster checkout and increased operational efficiency, sales, and customer satisfaction.
With enhanced call routing, voicebots have the capability to analyze and understand your customer's spoken requests to automatically route calls to the appropriate department or agent, further reducing transfer times and improving call efficiency. Advanced voicebots can also understand spoken language and respond naturally, allowing for more intuitive and human-like interactions with customers.
Voicebots can be programmed to support multiple languages, enabling seamless communication with customers from different linguistic backgrounds. They can also provide self-service options for routine tasks such as balance inquiries or appointment scheduling, empowering customers to resolve issues independently. Voicebots are well-equipped to become a key tool in your omnichannel payments strategy, providing opportunities to complete conversational payments and deliver transactions that increase both operational efficiency and customer satisfaction.
Descope your chatbot and voicebot payments from PCI DSS compliance
Your chatbots and voicebots can certainly manage complex customer interactions, but entrusting them with your customer’s PII and sensitive payment information brings your entire infrastructure into PCI DSS scope. Sycurio.Digital solves this problem by never allowing any payment card data to enter your organization, descoping your AI chatbots and voicebots. This allows your organization to securely and easily handle both chatbot payments and voicebot payments 24/7 – securing customer peace of mind and removing the need for them to switch channels in order for them to make a secure payment.
For voicebot payments, Sycurio’s payment security automation technologies ensures that your customers can easily make payments through their phone keypad using our DTMF masking solution, via speech recognition, or using embedded payment links sent directly to their devices via email, SMS, or other digital channels.
AI + humans = a match made for happy customers
It’s clear that both chatbots and voicebots can be hugely impactful in your omnichannel payments strategy, but it’s also crucial to point out that they don’t entirely remove the need for your organization to maintain a team of live agents. It's essential to maintain a balance by leveraging AI and automation where appropriate, while ensuring that human agents are readily available for more complex inquiries, payment issues, or situations that require empathy and personalized live support.
Sycurio.Digital payment links can be integrated with your chatbots and voicebots within hours, via our robust API or by using our plug-and-play payment link generator. Our secure payment links enable your customers to complete transactions directly in a chatbot or voicebot conversation using digital payment wallet options such as Apple Pay, Google Pay, and PayPal; instant bank-to-bank transfers; and tokenization services. With Sycurio.Digital, your brand and your customers are presented with a convenient, fast, secure, and flexible AI payment solution without ever needing to interrupt the digital conversation.
