Secure IVR Payments

Automating recurring processes and tasks is one of the best options for improving the efficiency of your call centers. However, there is still hesitation around utilizing phone communications when it comes to collecting payments from clients or customers. The biggest concern is collecting payments safely while securing customers’ personal data. 

Other concerns include helping customers who have issues or incorrectly input their payment information. How do you help these customers or give them the personal attention they need in an automated process? Businesses don’t want their reputations tarnished or customer satisfaction scores (CSAT) to fall because customers struggle to pay their bills.

With modern interactive voice response (IVR) technology, IVR payments are both safe and user-friendly and keep customer information secure. An IVR payment solution such as Plum SecureAssistant makes achieving full PCI compliance easier and more affordable by de-scoping your contact center from PCI-DSS requirements. 

What are Customer Self-Service IVR Payment Solutions?

A secure interactive voice response (IVR payment system is an automated telephony technology that allows customers to securely input personal information, such as credit card payments via the phone using their voice or keypad. These transactions occur without live agent assistance and ensure customer information is kept private and secure.

In 2006, American Express, Discover, JCB International, MasterCard, and Visa formed the Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard (PCI-DSS). PCI-DSS was established, and has continually updated, its standards for collecting credit card payments over the phone. If a technology is certified as PCI compliant, you can consider them secure and trustworthy with your customer’s sensitive information

Plum Voice goes through regular audits to maintain its PCI-DSS compliance certification.

Make a Contact Center PCI Compliant for Payments

How do you keep your contact center PCI compliant? There are two primary options: 

1. To get PCI certification, audit all aspects of your contact center that handle payment information, including software, hardware and live agents. 
2. Descope your contact center from PCI requirements by taking the payment process off-premise and into the cloud. Therefore, your live agents or on-site techs will have access to customer payment information.

The second option of descoping the contact center from PCI requirements is becoming an industry must-have, and Plum SecureAssistant is a fitting solution.  Used with Plum Fuse (a drag-and-drop, low-code, Graphical User Interface (GUI) tool), you can quickly and cost-efficiently set up your contact center to accept customer payments without worrying about in-house security issues.

IVR Payments Make Things Easy for Call Centers

Over-the-phone payments remain popular with consumers in every industry which includes common applications like making credit card payments, or bill payments in industries such as insurance, utilities, and healthcare invoices. Customers can easily utilize a customer self-service IVR solutions for simple tasks like making payments because it saves them time, is available 24/7 and doesn’t require waiting on hold for a live agent.

Automated Virtual AI Agents

If agent assistance is needed, certain solutions allow a live agent to remain on the line while the customer inputs their payment data. In this case, issues can be handled immediately by a knowledgeable, live representative while keeping the customers’ personal information hidden and secure.

What to Look for in an IVR Payment Platform

PCI compliance is the top priority when choosing a technology that will be handling payments. When considering an IVR payment solution, a technology that de-scopes your call center from these requirements is going to be the simplest, easiest, and most cost-efficient way to achieve compliance. Beyond that, pick a solution with the added benefit of keeping a live agent on the line to help with any issues or questions the customer may have during the process.

Security and Compliance

The customer self-service IVR payment platform should always comply with PCI-DSS and other industry standards needed to ensure customer data privacy is secure. The secure IVR payment platforms should also have extensive anti-fraud measures and robust software encryption.

Easy to Use for Customers and Employees

A self-service payment platform should be intuitive (using low-code GUI tools) to develop and deploy. Make sure you can customize where needed to fit your company’s needs. A secure and user-friendly application is critical for the end user experience. Complex or confusing IVR payment menus will frustrate customers and ultimately end up causing more work for your employees and lower customer satisfaction.

IVR Cloud Integration

The secure IVR payment system should easily integrate with your current business systems that  are being used such as a CRM, ERP, and other customer databases through APIs. This provides a seamless experience and operation of sharing data amongst all your systems for a fluid workflow.

Multilingual Voice Solutions and Currency

It’s important to ensure you can assist all your customers no matter their location or language. Choose an IVR customer self-service payment solution that can handle multiple languages and currencies.

Reliable and Scalable Payment Solutions

When hosted on a scalable and dependable platform, the best self-service IVR payment solutions will have minimal downtime. Service providers should operate 24/7 and offer continuous support to ensure business processes run continuously. The IVR payment solution should also be able to scale with your business as it changes and grows, especially with seasonal transaction volume spikes. 

Optimize Analytics and Reporting

Effective IVR payment platforms should offer a proficient and comprehensive reporting and analytics tool to help your company understand customer behavior, and FAQs, track performance, and make data-driven decisions. Voicetrends is an analytics toolkit that measures voice applications developed with Plum Voice tools. 

Safer Payment Options with Plum Voice

With the Plum Voice toolkit, users can utilize industry-leading IVR systems such as Plum Fuse and Plum DEV to build an IVR solution, then view analytics a visual customer data collection software with VoiceTrends and access a payment processing gateway, all on a secure cloud platform.

Start a free trial of Plum Fuse, Plum Dev today and build your automated customer communication solution. When you’re ready, contact a Plum expert for more information on all our voice automation tools.

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