A Recipe for Success:
Automating Payment
Processing with Conversational AI
Customer
The company is a global chain of restaurants specializing in Italian-American cuisine, primarily focused on pizza. With thousands of locations worldwide, it serves millions of customers daily through various channels, including dine-in, takeout, online orders, and delivery services. The company’s revenue for the fiscal year 2022 reached $4.2 billion, reflecting a 8% increase compared to the previous year. This growth can be attributed to strategic marketing initiatives, menu innovation, and improved operational efficiency. To enhance customer experience and streamline its operations, the company constantly explores innovative technologies.
Challenge
The restaurant’s call centers play a crucial role in accepting phone orders from customers who prefer the convenience of placing orders over the phone. However, the process of taking orders manually and then processing credit card payments was leading to several challenges:
Inconsistent Customer Experience
The customer experience varied based on the agent’s proficiency and workload, leading to inconsistencies in service quality.
Agent Workload
Call center agents had to juggle between order-taking and payment processing tasks, increasing their workload and affecting their overall efficiency.
Potential Errors and Security Risk
The manual handling of credit card information introduced the risk of errors in payment processing and compromised data security.
Time-Consuming Process
The manual process of accepting credit card information for payment processing was time-consuming and inefficient. This led to longer call durations and potential frustration for customers.
Solution
To address these challenges, the restaurant partnered with Omilia. Its Conversational Voice was deployed to streamline the credit card payment process during phone orders.
Automated Payment Processing
After a customer places an order over the phone, the AI takes over to securely collect credit card information, process payments including asking if the caller wants to include a tip, and provide payment confirmation.
Seamless Integration
Omilia’s AI solution was seamlessly integrated into the company’s call center operations, allowing for a unified and efficient customer experience.
Data Security
Omilia’s solution adheres to stringent security standards, ensuring the protection of sensitive customer data during payment transactions in a PCI-DSS compliant cloud environment.
Natural Language Understanding
The AI is equipped with advanced natural language processing capabilities, allowing it to understand and respond to customer inquiries, ensuring a natural and human-like interaction. During the payment processing, if errors do occur, the AI can transfer the caller back to the agent, passing them caller data so that they can take over from where the virtual assistant left off.
Scalability
With automated AI handling the payment processing, call center agents can focus solely on order-taking and providing exceptional customer service, allowing for better scalability of operations.
Result
The deployment of yielded significant benefits for the restaurant chain:
Agent Productivity: By eliminating the payment handling task agent workload has been reduced, leaving them time for upselling, cross-selling, sales-related activities and providing a more personalized service.
Data Security: The secure AI platform has ensured the protection of customer credit card information, bolstering trust and compliance.
Improved Accuracy: The AI-driven process minimized the risk of errors associated with manual payment processing, ensuring accurate payment transactions. The solution is currently processing 1500 to 2000 payments per day and has been live for over one year.
Enhanced Efficiency: The automated payment process has reduced agent call durations, leading to more efficient interactions with customers. It is successfully automating 90% of payments and this is expected to increase as the system is further tuned and trained.
Positive Brand Image: The adoption of advanced AI technology is a demonstration of the restaurant’s commitment to driving innovation to improve customer convenience and create a positive brand image.
What’s next
The collaboration between the restaurant and Omilia exemplifies how the deployment of automated conversational voice AI can transform traditional call center operations, resulting in improved efficiency, and customer experience.
The successful implementation of this solution has positioned the company as a frontrunner in leveraging AI to enhance customer service.
The company will be deploying this automated payment solution to all their franchisee call centers. Furthermore, the restaurant is in the process of using the Omilia conversational voice AI platform to automate their Food Ordering process as well. This is an exciting and truly innovative next step for them as they continue to leverage Omilia’s solutions in their call center operations.