IVR Payments – Introduction to Exchanging Information with Your Business System

IVR Payments offer an easy and secure way to accept payments by phone. Hosted IVR Payments solutions range from ready-made applications with basic payment flows to customized IVR Payment applications for more advanced payment processing needs.

In this article, we discuss whether integrating an IVR Payments solution with your business systems is right for your business and key considerations for how to connect your IVR Payment application. Our intent is to help you make informed decisions about the exchange of information between your IVR Payment application and your business systems and how this can meet your specific business needs.

Do You Need Your Payment Application to Talk to Your Business Systems?

Connecting your business systems to your IVR Payments solution is the foundational element for supporting most advanced payment processing workflows. This information exchange between your business systems and the IVR payment application gives you the ability to:

• Automate validation of the customer-entered “account number”
• Optimize payment experience with payment flows tailored to each customer. Common examples include t presenting amounts due and showing only relevant payment methods.
• Support highly customized payment workflows, such as applying payment workflow rules based on customer type, receivable age, brand, location, order status or other such data
• Support the use of advanced fraud tools, with minimal payment friction
• Support automated post-payment processes that you want to trigger based upon receipt of payment. Typically, these might be shipping an order, and providing or restoring a service.
• Automate the recording of non-sensitive transaction data to your business records

Adding information exchange to your IVR Payments solution is key for merchants with specific or advanced payment workflow needs. However, integrating with your systems may not be well suited if you don’t have easy access to the technical resources needed to complete the business-side information communication.

What are Your Options for Information Exchange

No Information Exchange:

A ready-made IVR Payment application offers a basic payment flow that is simple and effective. This solution is ideal for busy merchants who want an automated payment process without any bells or whistles, and for merchants who do not have the time or resources to complete an systems integration. Implementation is quick and requires minimal effort from the merchant. Customers enter all their own payment information, typically an “account” number, amount to pay without any validation of that information by the payment application. Merchants reconcile their business records manually using transaction reports that they can download online.

Batch File Information Exchange

An automated daily file exchange process is ideal for businesses that want an enhanced customer experience with “account number” validation, “amount due” presentation, and automation of payment reporting to your business systems. This offers merchants the lowest effort approach to deploy information exchange. Merchants simply automate generating and saving a “customer file” to their SFTP server daily – the IVR Payments application retrieves this file daily, and at day end it returns a transaction file with a record of all customer payments.

This two-way synchronization of information is an approach well suited for offering enhanced payment workflows where having up-to-minute account information isn’t critical, but having automation and increased accuracy is desired. This is a cost-effective method e that ensures a consistent and reliable information exchange that easily and efficiently supports most large-scale synchronization needs.

Real-Time Information Exchange

Best suited for processes requiring the most current data, this method employs an API for real-time retrieval of customer information and real time posting of transaction results back to the merchant systems. It ensures that your customers receive the most current account information during the call, enhancing their trust and satisfaction. It also ensures that your business applications are immediately updated, both for information consistency across the organization and so you can trigger automated actions upon notification of each payment event.

This two-way synchronization of data is more resource-intensive to initially deploy, but it offers a much more dynamic information exchange process that is ideal for businesses having both the need for this real-time data collaboration, and having the technical capability to deploy this.

Choosing a Connected Payment Solution

Connecting your business applications to your payment solution offers more flexibility to tailor your payment acceptance workflow, enhances the customer payment experience, and keeps data consistent, reliable and current across your business. In situations where data integrity is paramount, the automated synchronization of data safeguards your data from errors. Your decision on the best communication choice for your business comes down to balancing your payment workflow and information timeliness requirements with your technical resources and the upfront deployment effort.