Why Contact Centre Implementations Fail - How to Avoid the Pitfalls
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10th January 2024
What is ‘Twilio Pay’?
‘Twilio <Pay>’ is a product designed to take the hassle out of making payment over the phone. It enables organisations to accept payments via automated Interactive Voice Response (IVR) systems, or with agent assistance.
Contact centre agents are able to guide customers through the process and request payment information one item at a time in an order that's best for the individual customer.
Twilio Pay is compliant with Payment Card Industry (PCI) standards, which are mandated by credit card companies. When the customer is entering payment information and keying in the information on their handset, agents are unable to hear the DTMF (Dual-Tone Multi-Frequency) tones, meaning there is no way they can tell what is being entered.
Not a payment processor
Twilio Pay is not a payment processor; rather it captures payment details from customers and passes them onto the relevant payment processor, who is then responsible for processing the transaction and reporting the result back to Twilio.
Standard integrations are available with popular payment processors/gateways including, Stripe, CardConnect, Base Commerce, Chase Paymentech, Braintree and Adyen. Once set-up, these ‘Pay Connectors’ authorise Twilio to initiate transactions to create charges on credit and debit cards via tokenized payments.
If an organisation wishes to connect to a payment processor for which this is not a branded Pay Connector, they can use the Generic Pay Connector.
Use cases
We have helped organisations implement Twilio Pay for all sorts of use cases. One of the biggest requirements of our work with Oxfam UK was to enable donations and payments to be taken on outbound calls using Twilio Pay.
An area we're increasingly working in is using Twilio Pay to kick off the payment process in instant messengers (IMs), collecting information within IM apps before automatically providing a link for the customer to click through to complete their transaction in a PCI compliant way. The solution provides an elegant way of progressing customer communications to the point of payment on channels that do not have native payment options. Instead of having to ask for information to be repeated, the approach forms a seamless process.
