Balancing everyday payments is both easier and harder than ever before. On the positive side, there are more ways to pay than ever before, more banking options, and countless tools we can use to keep track of our finances. On the negative side, though, the demands on our money are much more numerous, and even insidious — think about how easy it is to unthinkingly rack up significant expenditure through microtransactions and auto-renewing subscription services.

Consequently, the average business is likely to receive more payment-related queries than ever before. People will want to know what their options are: can they pay by cryptocurrency? How are payments confirmed? What about paying in installments? And what about potential fraud issues: how are payments secured? What can a customer expect if something goes wrong?

This type of demand can place extreme strain on support service, and when queries go unanswered, customers can become understandably frustrated. So what’s the answer? Chatbots. Fundamentally flexible and increasingly capable, chatbots can field your payment queries and keep your customers happy. Here’s how:

They can swiftly provide updates

Chatbots can work quickly — much more quickly than people can. Given that a customer might only have a couple of minutes to ask a question, or even be accessing your site from their smartphone during a long commute, you can’t afford to make them wait. If they get sufficiently frustrated, they’ll give up, and leave the site with a sour impression of your company.

Even if it’s implemented in isolation, your chatbot can prove very useful through running through a provided set of FAQ answers — after all, you’re sure to get questions with generic answers (such as “Can I use payment system X?”), and an FAQ bot is fairly straightforward to set up these days. If you broadly integrate your chatbot with relevant payment systems, though, it will be able to do so much more (we’ll expand on this next).

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They can carry out basic actions

These days, a smart chatbot can do a lot more than simply respond to queries: it can actually action responses. For example, Capital One’s Eno chatbot doesn’t just provide Capital One customers with account updates or suggestions — it can actually make payments upon request. All a customer needs to do is open up a conversation with Eno, provide the payment details, and confirm them. They’ll receive a confirmation and be able to get on with their day.

Similarly, you could tie your chatbot into a consultation booking service, and allow it to book appointments with customers (whether online or in person) to discuss more serious issues. It’s all about breaking down your regular requests and figuring out which ones can most easily be automated — if you can pass something to your chatbot, you might as well, because your time can go towards tasks that truly need it.

They can work around the clock

Unlike a human assistant, a chatbot can remain operational indefinitely, ready to handle queries no matter the time of day. Given how used we’ve all become to getting things done on our own personal schedules using free cloud-based services, we don’t like losing that convenience and being asked to conform to standard office hours.

Instead of having your support staff wake up on Monday morning to find piles of requests waiting for them, you can have many of those requests handled automatically over the weekend. What’s more, a chatbot will scale to whatever extent your hosting and processing power allow. This is important if you cater to international customers because you might get a lot of traffic at a time that’s in the middle of the night for you.

Consider that such traffic might concern something essential like invoicing. Particularly for B2B arrangements with busy clients that are too valuable to simply drop when they miss payments, making it optimally easy to pay invoices is vital for your finances — so when someone gets a second in their schedule to pay their invoice but isn’t sure how to proceed, your chatbot can advise. Combine this information service with slick accounting through something like the Wave suite, and you’ll have a much easier time keeping your books in order.

They can escalate more complex issues

There are some things that even the most advanced chatbots can’t handle very well: for instance, customer complaints. If a customer needed to make a payment but it didn’t go through, and they’re furious as a result, you don’t want a chatbot dealing with that issue. The canned responses, mild cheeriness and lack of authority will infuriate the customer.

Fortunately, you can still use a chatbot initially, then have it pass the issue to a human assistant when it’s clear that the chatbot won’t suffice. Microsoft calls this initial interaction triage — assessing the situation, doing what it can, then escalating the matter. In this way, the customer can get the optimal combination of efficiency and efficacy: using the chatbot for anything basic, and quickly getting to a real person when something complex needs to be addressed.

To quickly recap, then, a chatbot can handle payment queries through rapidly answering basic questions, performing basic actions, and seamlessly escalating particularly challenging matters — all around the clock, and in a scalable way. Given how good chatbots have become in recent years, now is a great time to start using them.

via:https://chatbotslife.com/how-chatbots-can-handle-payment-queries-and-keep-customers-happy-a6bb2a71f7a1