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Payment Processing
Secure Voice Payments
Payment Processing Solutions Over the Phone
Payment Processing
The business world now relies on an omni-channel communications system to converse and stay connected with their customers. This doesn’t change when it comes to payments where there are various ways to make a payment including in-person, postal mail, online, phone apps to telephone.
The key to success is discovering what payment methods to offer to a customer base. It’s best to first understand how the business workflows are aligned in order to integrate the payment methods that will work best.
Integrating Payment Processing Company Solutions into a CRM
When interactive voice response (IVR) systems are integrated with payment applications, businesses can securely process customer payments over the phone. This gives customers a convenient and flexible method to pay their bills that isn’t dependent on an internet connection or mail service delivery. Customers get to interact with a business in a reliable, scalable and safe manner that is more conducive to some demographics.
Integrating an IVR payment system into a customer relationship management (CRM) database, gives a business the ability to personalize the customer's experience to tailor to their needs in how and when they want to make a payment. Phone transactions can be completed faster and are more efficient than traditional methods such as mailed payments because they don’t require live personnel to process them.
Secure payment processing solutions which use application programming interfaces (APIs) over a communications platform as a service (CPaaS) make it easy to integrate with a business’ existing CRM. Transferring data and other customer info is simple, fast and fluid when migrating to a cloud interface that supports integrated applications.
Benefits of Using an IVR System for Over-the-phone Payments
Some of the benefits for integrating phone payments into a business workflow include:
- By removing humans from payment transactions, businesses reduce the risk of fraud. That’s not an indictment of anyone’s employees. By eliminating the temptation, automated voice channels options make a better alternative to having agents manually process payments.
- Security of payments is key in protecting customer information and business financial processes. Plum Voice's cloud-based platform is both PCI-and HIPAA-compliant, making it easy to deliver the type of data protection that customers – and outside oversight bodies – want.
- An IVR system is less expensive than using live agents; even pennies on the dollar cheaper. For simple and repetitive processes like payments, using an IVR system can free up live agent time to handle more complex issues that require human intervention.
Payment Processing Solutions with Plum Voice Software
Complete Customization and Building Capabilities
Take advantage of Plum Voice’s cutting edge, feature-rich development platform to customize every aspect of your integrated IVR payment processing application. Developers can design a solution that fits the specific needs of individual companies, rather than retrofitting a turn-key, out-of-the-box product. Our developer tools include:
- Plum Fuse is an intuitive drag and drop, low-code, GUI tool that allows developers and non-technical users to create and manage IVR systems, intelligent virtual agents (IVAs) and conversational AI solutions. Templates for payment use cases are already available.
- Plum DEV is a VoiceXML (VXML) tool that enables developers to build interactive IVR, IVAs and conversational AI solutions by using their own code. Plum DEV also supports dynamic multi-channel messaging applications.
Both tools are hosted on a secure, cloud platform that complies with HIPAA and PCI standards.
Make payment processing secure, fast and easy for your customers.
Secure Payment Infrastructure
Plum Voice offers a secure, compliant infrastructure which protects customers’ personal information, sensitive data and your brand reputation. Plum Voice has gone through rigorous audits to achieve PCI-DSS, SOC2 and HIPAA compliance and is also a Visa Verified vendor. Our cloud infrastructure resides in physically secure, geographically dispersed, Class A data centers, all fed by Tier 1 redundant telecom infrastructure.
Easy API Integration with Payment Gateways
With APIs, you can easily integrate your Plum Voice applications with most payment gateways. This saves a business time, money and resources. They no longer are restricted to one payment gateway and now have the flexibility to switch as needed.
Scalability with Plum Voice's Platform
Plum Voice’s cloud platform is designed to scale automatically to an increase or decrease in call volume that comes from natural growth or call spikes. Coupled with a 99.9% uptime guarantee, companies can process every payment call they receive regardless of time of day.
Enhanced Customer Experience
VoiceTrends analytics toolkit lets you monitor application performance and track user trends. This helps you to optimize your Plum Voice applications for business efficiency and user-friendliness, ensuring that callers have a great experience when making payments.
Payment Processing Touchpoints
Acquirers
These are the infrastructure companies, and oftentimes banks. They help get merchants set up in the payments process. This includes providing point of sale (POS) terminals.
Processors
These companies are responsible for actually transmitting transaction data between different entities in the payments process. Some acquirers double as their own processors.
Card Issues
Again these are banks, but these are the ones who manage the credit and debits on credit card accounts. Some banks function as all three, acquirers, processors and issuers, but there are enough different issuers that don’t perform those other functions that they are placed into a separate category. The main point here is to understand what role(s) a particular bank plays into a business’ payment process.
Card Networks
In the United States, there are two big card networks, Visa and Mastercard. These companies function like traffic cops in the payment process by directing information between different entities. They also set rules and fees around card usage, including security like the PCI-DSS standard.
Infrastructure Support
Acquirers tend to deal with known companies in order to mitigate risk. However, there are many small businesses that need merchant infrastructure for accepting payments. The companies that provide these services to such merchants are basically infrastructure middlemen. They tend to work directly with the card networks to get merchants up and running.
Payment Gateways
These are interfaces, or ec-commerce applications, used for processing payments online or over the phone. Essentially, if a business operates online and doesn’t have a brick and mortar store to physically process credit cards, they need a payment gateway to process credit cards. Processors may provide a payment gateway to a merchant.
How Does a Payment Processing Gateway Work?
Here’s a quick synopsis of how Plum Voice partners with payment processors to take payments via phone:
- When a customer calls into a self-service phone system to make a payment, they will enter their personal information (e.g. account number, phone number, social security #, ZIP code, etc.) to request permission for entering the payment system on behalf of the merchant.
- The merchant processes the request and passes it on to the acquirers and the processors as mentioned above.
- The acquirers and processors pass the payment request to the card network associated with the customer. This could be Visa, Mastercard, American Express, etc.
- The card network then passes the request to the associated bank that issued the customer’s card. The bank checks the card for validation criteria - verifying that there is an adequate account balance or absence of fraud activity - then the charge approval, or denial, is sent back to the merchant.
This process takes only a few seconds for the merchant to request and receive the purchase amount which was approved by the customer.
Security
PCI-DSS Communication Gateway
Companies who offer or provide credit card payment services must ensure that those payments go through a PCI-DSS compliant environment.
There are a number of different devices and technologies that require security. These include card readers, point of sale systems, networks and wireless access routers, payment card data storage and transmission and online payment applications and shopping carts.
Whether a business falls into one or multiple categories, it’s worth achieving and maintaining PCI-compliance. This helps to better protect customers and their important financial data, while reducing payment processing risks for a business.
PCI-Merchant Levels
The PCI merchant levels correspond to the volume of credit card transactions a company engages in on an annual basis. The levels range from 1 (highest) to 4 (lowest) and the technological and security requirements increase with each one.
Our Plum Fuse platform is merchant level 1 PCI-compliant. That means that if a company wants to process payments over the phone, but don’t have (or want) to go through the PCI compliance process, they can do so by simply using Plum Voice, thereby gaining the benefit of best-IVR-companies that provide voice communications technology and PCI compliance.
Avoid Credit Card Chargebacks
What Are Chargebacks?
A chargeback is when a bank forces a company to refund a received payment. Granted, there are times when a chargeback is understandable, like in cases of fraud, but it’s still a hassle for the company. Situations may arise when a company wants to challenge the legitimacy of a chargeback request. Therefore, companies need a record of the charge approval for backup.
Call Recording Software
One method is to record phone calls when payments are made. With the right technology, a business can limit the recording to the most important part of a call, the actual transaction. A good call recording captures all the audio heard on the call as it happens. This includes the prompts that callers heard, and speech the caller said, all the buttons the caller pressed, etc.
Call Recording Setup in Plum Fuse
To make effective use of this information, businesses have to set up a database on their platform or cloud to house the recordings. Plum Fuse doesn’t store any information after a call ends to maintain adherence with compliance standards. Once a caller hangs up, any information that is collected is automatically deleted.
Once a business has these recordings, they can organize and archive them as deemed necessary. It’s worth bearing in mind that Plum Fuse is a PCI-compliant platform that keeps sensitive customer financial data safe and secure.
Why Using IVR for Payment Processing Makes Sense
Learn the value that hosted IVR payment processing brings to businesses and how it functions as a critical component in a broader payment processing portfolio.