Remember cash?
You know; real, folding money that we all used to part with when buying things.
Well, although cash is of course still king, transacting by phone is now an increasingly normal aspect of everyday life.
From eCommerce to subscription services, organizations large and small rely on this smartest of technologies to maintain and grow vital revenue streams.
Now an integral component of many contact centers, payment processing functionality is getting cleverer – and that means Managed Service Providers, Value Added Resellers and System Integrators are blessed with yet another channel opportunity.
“Transacting over the phone is still a very popular way for consumers to make purchases, so organizations must ensure the experience is both pleasant and secure,” says Denis Menard, Application Design Specialist at global enterprise-class contact center and IVR provider ComputerTalk, whose icePay plug-in helps achieve just that.
“Maintaining the personal touch which exists when a caller engages with a human agent is still vitally important, so combining that with the security and convenience of automated payment processing enables organizations to tick both boxes.
“Moreover, our icePay solution brings organizations into PCI compliance by eliminating the need to store credit card information.”
Whether making a retail purchase, subscribing to a service, or enrolling in a class or on a course, icePay by ComputerTalk firstly connects callers with agents for that all-important human interaction.
Using callers’ answers to questions, agents fill out an online form that links the caller, agent and transaction through a unique reference number.
A ‘submit’ button on the form connects both the caller and the agent to a super-secure Interactive Voice Response (IVR) platform via which the caller provides their payment card details.
Uniquely – although the agent is able to hear the prompts and the caller – they cannot hear the DTMF tones pressed by the caller and they remain on the call and able to provide assistance if the caller needs help or clarification.
When the transaction is complete, the agent is right there to either answer further questions or pursue upsell opportunities before the interaction finally ends.
“It totally suppresses the DTMF tones that are created when a caller uses their phone to key in their payment card details,” says Menard.
“It then either exchanges caller credit card information with a third-party payment provider, which in turn then creates a payment token for things like recurring subscription or membership payments, or it fully authorizes a one-off monetary transaction.”
Crucially – from the perspective of the organization making the sale – icePay automatically associates the transaction with the organization’s unique merchant number.
That means the transaction and all of its component parts – such as customer identity and the commercial interaction between the merchant and its third-party payment provider – belongs solely to the merchant and can be fully-managed by them.
“All of that means our customers are able to leverage the economies of scale that exist within their percentage commission agreements with their payment providers,” says Menard.
“The more transactions they perform using the same merchant number, the smaller that payment provider percentage is.”
Also uniquely, ComputerTalk licences icePay customers based on the number of agents they have, not on the number of transactions they process.
Also, icePay can act as a stand-alone platform run in parallel with an organization’s payment system, or it can be fully-integrated with an existing payment interface.
For users of ComputerTalk’s all-encompassing ice contact center, icePay is an easy add-on.
“Many organizations are stuck with legacy contact center functionality but have a very specific and immediate credit card handling pain point,” says Menard.
“They are able to deploy icePay to solve that issue without necessarily transitioning fully to a new contact center platform.
“For our reseller partners, that convenience and flexibility also doubles as a great way of enabling their customers to make the first step towards full ice contact center procurement down the road.”
To learn more about how icePay can help your and your customers’ businesses grow, visit https://www.computer-talk.com/product/contact-center-modules/pci-payment-processing
