Before your phone agent takes a card, decide what it's allowed to decide

What's new

On October 20, Sierra, the AI customer service company, announced that its agents can now take card payments during a phone call through Stripe. When it's time to pay, the agent switches into a secure payment mode. The caller types their card number on the phone keypad, and the details go to Stripe to process. According to Sierra, the agent never sees the card details, only whether the payment went through and the last four digits.

Sierra is also now listed in the Stripe App Marketplace, so a business already on Stripe can connect a Sierra agent without a custom integration. Sierra first launched payments that meet the top level of the card industry's security standard, PCI Level 1, back in April.

The example Sierra gives is Cedar, a healthcare billing company. Patients who call about a confusing medical bill can ask their questions and pay in the same call. Sierra says that when patients start a payment with Cedar's agent, 71.3% of those calls end in a successful payment. That's Sierra's figure, about one customer, but the idea is easy to understand: fewer transfers, fewer payment links sent and forgotten.

The part you can't hand off

The card number is the part you can hand to a vendor. The judgment about money is the part you can't.

A person on your billing line makes small decisions all day without thinking of them as decisions. They know when to waive a late fee, when to offer a payment plan, when a caller is confused rather than difficult, and when to say "let me check with my manager." An agent that can take money needs those decisions written down, because it will otherwise either refuse everything or improvise.

So before you switch payments on, answer these questions with whoever owns billing in the room.

Six questions to settle first

Which payments may the agent take? Full balance only, or partial payments too? Any amount, or up to a limit? Many businesses will want a ceiling above which a person confirms. Decide too whether the agent can take payment from someone other than the account holder, like a parent paying for an adult child.

What may it offer? Payment plans, discounts, waived fees, refunds. Make a short list of what the agent can offer and under what conditions. Anything not on the list, it doesn't offer.

What happens when the caller disputes the amount? This is the call that matters most. The agent should explain the charge if it can, and if the caller still disagrees, stop asking for payment and hand off. Pushing for payment on a disputed bill is how you lose a customer.

What happens when a payment fails? Declined card, wrong digits, timeout. Decide how many tries, what the agent says, and whether it offers another way to pay, like a link by text or a call back from a person during business hours.

When does a person take over? Write down the triggers: the caller asks for one, mentions hardship, gets upset, or raises something the agent can't answer. Make sure the handoff passes along what was already said, so the caller doesn't start again.

What does the caller get afterward? A receipt by text or email, with the amount, the last four digits and a way to reach a person. Callers paying a machine will want proof more than callers paying a person.

What the caller should hear

The words matter as much as the rules. A caller who is about to type a card number into a phone wants to know three things: that they're talking to an automated agent, exactly how much they're paying, and that the card details are safe.

So have the agent say the amount out loud before switching to the keypad, and ask the caller to confirm it. Have it explain what's about to happen in one plain sentence: "I'll switch to a secure line now. Type your card number on your keypad. I won't hear or see it." And after the payment, have it repeat the amount, the last four digits and where the receipt is going.

Also decide what the agent says if someone asks, "Am I talking to a real person?" The honest answer is the only good one. People are more forgiving of a clear, polite agent than of one that dodges.

None of this is complicated. It just has to be written down before the first caller hears it, rather than discovered from a complaint afterward.

Try it before callers do

Once the rules are written, call the agent yourself, more than once, and ask a colleague who didn't write the rules to do the same. Play the confused caller, the one who disputes the bill, the one whose card is declined, and the one who asks for a discount that isn't on the list. Listen for whether the agent follows the rules or bends them to be helpful. Agents tend to want to please, and "I can take ten percent off for you" is an easy thing for one to say if nothing tells it otherwise.

Then look at the first week of real calls. Read the transcripts where a payment was started but not completed, and the ones that ended in a handoff. That's where you'll find the rules you forgot to write, and the questions callers ask that nobody on your team expected.

Who owns the money rules

One last decision: who keeps these rules current. Prices change, policies change, and someone will eventually agree to a new payment plan offer in a meeting. If nobody updates the agent, the agent keeps offering last quarter's terms. Put one named person in charge of the agent's money rules, and make changing them part of changing the policy itself. When the billing policy changes, the agent's rules change the same day, and someone calls the agent to check that it took.

If you're adding payments to an AI agent and want help writing the rules, testing the calls or building the handoff, that's the work our AI applications and agents team does. Talk to us.

Related work: Sutton Place.