When making the decision to integrate an IVR Payments solution into your business’s existing billing system, it’s important that you understand all the benefits to your business that such a solution brings, as well as the importance of data exchange between your IVR Payments solution and your business’s billing system.

Some of the key benefits of integrating IVR Payments with your existing billing system include:

• Improved Customer Experience: With integrated IVR payment systems, customers can quickly and easily make payments over the phone 24/7. When calling in to your IVR Payment system they can be presented with balances and due dates on the spot, reducing the amount of time they spend looking up and punching in information. This makes the payment process smoother, faster, and more convenient for your customers, improving their overall experience with your business. It also makes it faster to record payments and reconcile accounts, thereby reducing administrative costs and freeing up your staff to focus on other important tasks.
• Increased efficiency: Integrating your IVR Payment systems into your billing process will eliminate the need for manual data entry when posting customer payments which both saves time and reduces the chance of manual input errors by staff members. Instead, the posting and reconciliation process is done automatically.
• Enhanced Security: Both the Billing & Payment process involves the handling of sensitive customer information, so it’s critical to ensure that data is kept secure. Integrating these systems enhances security by ensuring that all customer information flows between secure systems without any human intervention. This will reduce the risk of data loss and other security issues that can come from staff handling sensitive data.
• Better Data Insights: Integrating payment systems into your billing system gives you access to a wealth of data, such as customer payment activity history, payment trends, and customer behavior. This data can be analyzed to gain insights into customer preferences, identify opportunities for growth, and improve business processes.

Having made the decision then to implement an integrated IVR Payments solution as part of your billing and payment acceptance process, we come next to discussing why data exchange is such an important component of the IVR Payment implementation.

If you are unfamiliar with this subject, below we discuss the main reasons why you might want/need your payment applications to exchange data with your business systems:

• To deliver a call experience that that requires the IVR Payment application to access information that is found within you your customer records. For example: Your customer entering a customer’s ID, and the IVR Payment application requesting information from your business systems to enable one or more of the following functions happening during each call:
• Automated presentation to callers of their total amount due or amount past due
• Applying call experience treatments that are account specific, As the merchant, you may wish to apply customer specific payment rules and offer different processing options to each caller based on each caller’s own account balance, account status, or customer type.
• Routing of credit card processing to different merchant accounts.
• Validating that each entered customer ID actually exists on file. In some cases, you may even wish to verify the caller’s identity by matching the caller’s entry of two customer identifiers, for example prompting the caller to enter their Account Number and ZIP. The data exchange will then allow for the verification of these pieces of information while the caller is on the line.

Once the payment has been processed, data exchange automates the updating of your customer records by returning the transaction results back to your business systems. This occurs once the payment has been authorized or tokenized by your payment gateway/processor, thereby automating the account reconciliation process while reducing labor costs and mistakes resulting from human error.

Datatel offers the flexibility of multiple data exchange methods to match your business and technical requirements for connecting your IVR Payment application to your business systems, including:

• Out of the box, CryptoIVR PRO includes Datatel’s REST API’s (application programming interface) for a real-time exchange of information with your business systems.
• If yours is a business process that does not call for a real-time data exchange, Datatel offers the flexibility of substituting an async batch file exchange of customer/transaction records using SFTP.
• Datatel also offers custom integrations for businesses that need to use their information system vendor’s own proprietary API’s. When discussing payment processing solutions, our sales engineers will help you identify what data exchanges your business process needs and also ask what data integration method you can support.

In conclusion, integrating your IVR payment systems into your billing system can bring many benefits to your business, including increased efficiency, improved customer experience, enhanced security, and better data insights.