Merchant Services Increases Revenue by Adding IVR to Product Suite

Summary

A National Merchant Services Company (NMSC) partnered with Plum Voice to enhance its comprehensive payments solutions suite by providing an interactive voice response (IVR) option. NMSC customers rapidly adopted this product addition, and it improved their overall customer satisfaction. The company uses the Plum Voice platform to handle over-the-phone payments securely and the Plum DEV tool to design and deploy the IVR systems.

Company Story

NMSC is a leader in integrated payment processing solutions for verticals with specific transaction needs. They have over 20,000 active clients and have over $25B in annual card payment volume. NMSC helps businesses across various industries to simplify the bill repayment process by offering a comprehensive suite of automated payment processing services, solutions and technology. The result is an enhanced overall experience for customers and businesses.

Challenge

NMSC realized their payment solution set lacked options to meet their customers’ needs, so they contacted Plum Voice for ideas and options. As a reseller of Plum Voice technology, the decision to add an IVR payment option to their portfolio was “really about extending the payment counter as far as we can,” according to NMSC’s Chief Revenue Officer (CRO). An around-the-clock payment option filled a gap and gave customers a better overall product.

Several factors set Plum Voice apart from the competition when searching for an IVR vendor. First and foremost, NMSC is a PCI-DSS Level 1 payment warehouse. They “absolutely had to have a partner who was PCI compliant as well,” said their CRO, so Plum Voice’s PCI level 1 compliance met their criteria. While NMSC considered four different IVR providers, their CRO noted that they “needed more than just a vendor. We needed people with experience with payments.” NMSC needed a reliable partner to provide the tools to build IVR systems and educate them on the best ways to design and deploy IVR technology throughout the process. Plum was a great fit to meet all their needs.

Solution

NMSC’s solution started with a call script. “I had a script written. I knew what I wanted to say, the order of the call flow, and the validations we needed to use,” said their CRO. The next step was to put those ideas into a workflow that followed best practices, which was uncharted territory for NMSC. They relied on Plum Voice’s professional services team to help fine-tune and optimize the call script before building their application. This type of personal attention left a positive impression on NMSC’s CRO, “Having those guys to talk to and help with the call flow was vital. You can’t put a price on that kind of feedback from a vendor.”

NMSC operates its payment gateway, so it was beneficial that the Plum DEV tool is payment gateway agnostic to help with the integration process. Validations accepted by the IVR system built with Plum DEV feed NMSC’s payment gateway. It can cross-reference caller input with their NMSC customer profile enabling the IVR system to provide the correct payment options based on each caller’s payment history.