Artificial intelligence is all the rage. Not only is AI all over the headlines, it is also top of mind for many company leadership teams, who find themselves asking, “How can this new tool help our company?”
Like most companies, each year, we develop a set of goals for enhancing our revenues, systems, efficiency and scalability. Our motto is “See something, say something.” Meaning: If you can find a better way of doing something, speak up! This year, our VP of operations recommended looking at how AI could help with scalability and profitability companywide. In this article, I want to share our findings.
AI assistants can even make the customer’s experience feel more personalized.
Streamline Customer Support and the Sales Funnel
Customer support is vital to any company and can range from billing inquiries to password issues and general account concerns. Many companies must maintain large teams to handle these requests. By automating common requests like membership cancellations, providing lost passwords and addressing fraud concerns, right on the spot, an interactive chatbot can free up resources so that live customer support agents can spend more time on complex concerns.
AI chatbots are also a great way to provide an instant response when a customer is looking to sign up for a new account, and to quickly direct customers to whoever can help them best. Many companies have a lead form right on their website, which typically pushes any sort of interaction, including things like account cancellations and vendor requests, to the company’s customer relationship management (CRM) software.
An AI chatbot can send customers who genuinely need help straight to the support team, redirect vendor inquiries to operations and funnel sales leads to sales representatives, allowing them to respond promptly. This could help sales teams focus on qualified leads and identify potential new clients, while redirecting non-sales activity to its proper destination.
AI assistants can even make the customer’s experience feel more personalized. This may initially sound counterintuitive — How can talking to a robot feel personal? — but one of the features we found beneficial was how AI can present cancel-keep offers. If a customer wants to cancel, AI can quickly review their past purchases and present them with a customized offer for content that they might like to buy.
Locking Up Fraud and Managing Risk
As a payment processor, our toolbox is also our merchants’ toolbox — especially when it comes to preventing fraud. New fraud trends can initially be hard to discover, identify and detect, due to the massive amount of transaction data. AI is a great tool for identifying abnormalities and patterns that indicate fraud, because it is so good at analyzing vast amounts of data and analyzing it for different verticals. For example, it can look at transaction patterns among different types of merchants, like adult, nutra or traditional ecommerce.
That being said, our risk team urges anyone looking at adding AI to sensitive processes to proceed carefully. As a payment processor, we closely monitor AI in fraud and risk management in case it unintentionally flags legitimate traffic that shares certain elements with fraud trends, and we adjust it regularly to ensure legitimate traffic is unaffected. Always make sure your AI software is up to date and up to speed on current trends.
Developing Quality Assurance
Of all the potential applications we have reviewed, quality assurance is one where nearly any company could benefit from using AI. AI can assess the code algorithm used for a specific function and tell you if it is optimal performance-wise. It could also be helpful in devising testing procedures. However, our chief technology officer warns that there is still debate on what AI generates.
If your company has not yet fully researched or invested in AI, you’re not alone. We wanted to point out a few areas where AI could help make improvements and bolster your company’s technology toolbox. Take it one tool, or step, at a time. Vet what capabilities are available and weigh the pros and cons. Since AI is here to stay, the best path forward is to build your knowledge.
Cathy Beardsley is president and CEO of Segpay, a merchant services provider offering a wide range of custom financial solutions including payment facilitator, direct merchant accounts and secure gateway services. Under her direction, Segpay has become one of four companies approved by Visa to operate as a high-risk internet payment services provider. Segpay offers secure turnkey solutions to accept online payments, with a guarantee that funds are kept safe and protected with its proprietary Fraud Mitigation System and customer service and support. For any questions or help, contact sales@segpay.com or compliance@segpay.com.
