Using CSR Bill Notifications To Streamline Your Phone Payments
Let’s be honest, as a biller, isn’t taking bill payments over the phone from customers a bit of a pain? It’s time-consuming and expensive from a staff perspective. It also exposes you to PCI and NACHA compliance overheads in your call center.
What’s worse, if you also do outreach to customers/members to request payments, the time and expense increases whenever:
- You are unable to get hold of the customer/member
- You get hold of the customer/member, and they ask you to call back later
- You get hold of the customer/member, and they ask you to call a family member or friend who has agreed to make a payment for them.
Is There a Better Way?
Using Orbipay EBPP’s CSR Bill Notifications, your CSRs can send emails and texts with details of amounts owed, and the option of adding standard or custom messaging for a variety of use cases, including:
- As part of new account opening over the phone, where an initial payment is needed.
- Pro-active outreach to customers/members before their due date
- As part of outreach where you cannot get hold of customers/members after their due date
- To avoid handling debit or credit card data if the customer/member asks to use a new Card for their payment.
Basically, any situation where you need to capture a payment from your customers without the CSR having to make the payment themselves.
Is It Complicated to Use?
No, it is not. By completing a simple web form in Orbipay EBPP’s customer service application, your CSRs can easily send a notification.
Here’s what it looks like, and the options it offers:
[1] Notifications can be sent to your customer/member or a third party.
[2] Notifications can be sent via email or text message.
[3] You can select one of the amounts the customer/member owes or enter the amount to be paid.
[4] You can set the notification to expire on a certain date and time (for example, your customer must make a payment by 8:00 p.m. today to avoid going into collections) or they can never expire.
[5] You can set a range of standard customer messages, or allow the CSR to enter a message (useful for giving instructions to a third party).
Once your CSR has selected or entered the data for the notification they want to send they select Continue. They then get to review the notification and can correct any errors or spelling mistakes. They can then send the notification.
The customer or third party will then receive the notification and can use the Magic Link it contains to seamlessly access your customer website to make their payment.
Magic Link…What’s That?
Now this is the really cool part of this feature. The Magic Link is a secure URL that contains an encrypted block of data that will automatically authenticate the user that clicks on it into your customer site, taking them to the enter payment page:
This means the recipient of the CSR Bill Notification doesn’t need to know any of the data normally entered to access your customer/member site—the Magic Link removes that friction from the payment flow completely—all they need to know is details of the Payment Method they want to use.
In summary, CSR Bill Notifications allows your CSRs to send out actionable requests for payment via email or text, containing customer/member-specific messaging and a Magic Link to make payments seamless. They can do this while they have your customer/member on the phone or as part of customer/member outreach.
To learn more about how to use Orbipay EBPP, please check our blog for more Product Insights.
Alacriti’s Orbipay EBPP is a customizable electronic billing and payments solution for businesses and financial institutions of all sizes. Orbipay EBPP offers convenient and flexible choices that include all the payment channels, payment methods, and payment options expected from a modern digital bill pay experience. For more information, please contact us at info@alacriti.com.
