When it comes to the specific needs of contact centers, adding a purpose-built application for customer service representative-assisted payments can help mitigate risk, lower costs and improve the overall agent and customer experience.
Here are some key benefits of incorporating a purpose-built payment application into your contact center:
PCI Compliance
Maintaining PCI/DSS compliance is time-consuming and expensive. Most companies subject to PCI certification hire at least one security engineer to oversee PCI certification efforts, and draw on other resources during audit season.
Leveraging a hosted, purpose-built contact center payment application as part of a broader omni-channel payment strategy, can remove the need to collect and store credit card and other sensitive information in your data-center altogether. The savings in hardware, software, and development, testing and administration can add up to tens or even hundreds of thousands of dollars per year.
Reduced Fraud Exposure
A purpose built contact center payment platform can also help reduce agent (internal) and customer (external) fraud by leveraging advanced user management controls, audit capabilities and proactive surveillance. Another example of advanced call center payment capabilities is the removal of sensitive payment data from the customer engagement. A contact center payment application allows callers to pay using a previously used payment method. This stored payment information is masked from the customer service representative’s view, making it a safer application, as confidential cardholder information is kept private. In a similar respect, payment information is also visually masked for first time payment transactions while the customer service representative enters in the cardholder information.
Increased Profitability
To compete for customers today, businesses need to accept a variety of payment types: credit cards, debit cards, and ACH. Each has to be processed differently, and each has its own set of rules and fees.
With a robust payment system, customer service representatives can collect more revenue faster by securely and accurately taking real time credit card and ACH payments on behalf of their customers. Employing a contact center payment system will allow your staff to setup a variety of features including payment workflows and payment policies (simple or complex), future payments, recurring multiple transaction payment plans, etc. A dedicated contact center payment application should be powered by an intelligent payment platform that can use a variety of means to lower processing fees (e.g., lowest cost routing).
Improved Customer Loyalty through workflow optimization
If you’re easy to do business with, customers will keep coming back. Having a system that makes paying for goods and services easy is a great way to improve customer satisfaction, which builds loyalty.
But most payment gateways and virtual terminals used by call centers aren’t purpose-built or integrated to other systems in use, so they interfere with fluid agent workflows, resulting in disjointed processes, unnecessarily long hold and call times and poor customer experience.
Call Centers keen on workflow optimization and metrics emphasizing agent performance will find improvements in agent-assisted payments an area with significant ROI potential.
A purpose-built call center payment application optimizes agent workflows throughout the payment-related customer engagement -- from customer ID to payment confirmation -- resulting in a substantial reduction in call time.
A well-built solution should include:
- Optimized Agent Workflow & Navigation
- Auto–data population
- Customer profiles and payment history retained from all channels
A purpose built application can also ensure transaction activities are logged to Customer Relationship Management, ERP, Accounts Receivable or other business systems in real-time for future use.
Some additional benefits include reduced hold and call handle times, reduced caller and CSR effort, increased first call resolution, and elimination of potential mistakes.
Incorporating a purpose-built payment application into your contact center allows you to become PCI Compliant, reduce fraud exposure, decrease costs and streamline daily operations, resulting in an improved overall experience for agents and customers alike.
