Conversational Messaging Podcast by Gupshup

Episode 008: Make Payment Collection seamless with 1-Click-Bill-Pay

August 27, 2021 Beerud Sheth and Srinivas Vijayaraghavan Season 2 Episode 8
Conversational Messaging Podcast by Gupshup
Episode 008: Make Payment Collection seamless with 1-Click-Bill-Pay
Show Notes Transcript

In today’s episode of the Gupshup Conversational Messaging Podcast, Beerud and Srini discuss how incorporating conversational messaging in the payment collection process can work in favor, not only of the consumers but also the business. Listen as they talk about why this matters, how it works, and how to get started.


Less Painful Payments 

The payment process nowadays, despite the online option being made available for so long, is still inconvenient for consumers. More often than not, consumers’ lack of easy and customer-friendly payment options leads to late payments that may result in not only bad consumer experience (i.e. incurring late fees, experiencing service interruption, etc.) but also lower collection rates, longer collection cycles, and lower cash flow for businesses. Beerud thinks we can end this pain both from the businesses and consumers’ perspective by making the payment process conversational and interactive, but still efficient. 

“Payments are critical, but the process today is incredibly inefficient.” - Beerud Sheth

The One-Click Process

Beerud talks about how we can revolutionize the payment process by simplifying the traditional ten-click process to a one-click process. This means that instead of the consumers having to do a series of steps and processes just to complete a payment (which may need extra time), they just have to click a link and authorize (may be a fingerprint, pin, or however the consumers set their security settings) their payments. Consumers can now stop worrying about late fees or anything else, as they can do their payments anytime, anywhere.

“The goal is to make every message meaningful, interactive, actionable, and conversational to accomplish the purpose.” - Beerud Sheth


The High Returns

Beerud believes that it’s now time for businesses to start transforming their payment process. It’s not complicated at all—Gupshup can do all the work. This is an investment that requires zero effort from the businesses and consumers but with an incredibly high return. 

“We've done some extensive training, we have very rich datasets to train our AI to figure out reliably. Because you can't have errors in something as important as this.” - Beerud Sheth


To know more about Conversational Messaging for Payments and for more information about Beerud Sheth and Srinivas B Vijayaraghavan, listen to this episode.


Bio:

Beerud is the co-founder and CEO of Gupshup, the world's leading platform for cloud messaging and conversational experiences. It is used by over 100K+ customers and developers and handles over 6 billion messages per month. He previously founded and led Elance (now Upwork, a publicly listed company), the pioneer of online freelancing and the gig economy.

Prior to founding Elance, he worked in the financial services industry – modeling, structuring, and trading fixed income securities and derivatives at Merrill Lynch and Citicorp Securities. His graduate research, at the MIT Media Lab, involved developing autonomous learning agents for personalized news filtering. Beerud earned an M.S. in Computer Science from MIT & a B.Tech. in Computer Science from IIT Bombay, where he was awarded the Institute Silver Medal.

Srinivas has over 2 decades of experience in running marketing for high-growth technology companies and managing corporate marketing, product marketing and demand generation. Prior to Gupshup, he held marketing leadership positions with Qubole, Pluralsight, Mobileum and Tejas Networks.



Resources:

Gupshup.io

00:01

Listen to insights on how conversational messaging is changing the way businesses and their customers engage. Join gupshup CEO Beerud and VP for marketing Srini, and an array of guests for conversations about conversations. This is the gupshup conversational messaging podcast.

 

00:28

Hello, and welcome to another episode and actually a new season we're calling it Season Two of the conversational messaging podcast with me Srini and Geerud from capture. So in season one, we focused a lot on what conversational messaging is, and its impact on transforming customer engagement. We also looked at how this technology can help transform processes around marketing, commerce and support, and also specifically how it can transform customer engagement across different industries like like banking or retail, etc. in season two, we want to go a little deeper and focus on the innovations that are coming into the marketplace, leveraging conversational messaging, and how that can impact specific processes and business objectives for different verticals. And the first such innovation we want to talk about today is around the area of bill payments. Now, as as people, we've all paid bills, at some point of time in our life and continue to do it, whether it isn't a form of paying for your utilities, or it is in the form of paying for any subscription service. Or, you know, it could be even payments to mortgages and loans. And the reminders that we get from a lot of the brands are mostly in terms of static messages to say that your your bill is due or payment is due at cetera. But there is a way to sort of transform this whole process to make bill payments, more efficient, more customer friendly and more empathetic. And to join me in talking about it as always as Bill. So, Bill, welcome to the show, as always.

 

02:06

Yeah, now excited to share more thoughts about new products and such. And yeah, I think payments actually is payment reminders account for a big portion of enterprise messages that flow through the gupshup platform. Right. So it's really an important things, I mean, important thing. And clearly, you know, payments are critical or essential to business, right? businesses need cash flow, they have to collect a bit on schedule and on time. And without that, you know, this will just come to a standstill, right? So So payments are critical. But the process today is incredibly inefficient. And because what happens is, you know, think about it as consumers all of us, right, we use maybe cable TV, and we use you know, utilities, of course, electric and gas and you know, other things, of course we use credit cards we use, maybe EMI is an insurance payments and building society maintenance, things like that all of these. In fact, there's so many of these payments, and it just becomes hard to keep track of and then each of those vendors or merchants or entities would send these reminders. And at some point, you know, I think it just gets a little overwhelming. Now people also lead busy lives, right between work and family and friends and other things, vacations and so on that that people do. Sometimes you just miss paying it on time, or you forget about it, or it slips through the cracks. Yep, and so on. Right. So it may not be intentional, right. But but it it slips and and that's a huge problem, right? It's a huge problem for both businesses and consumers, right? businesses end up with delayed payments, and longer collection cycles. And consumers may incur penalties may incur, incur service interruptions, and all kinds of problems. And it just it's sort of strange, I think both parties are interested in it happening. The consumer wants to pay the merchant wants to collect on time. But still, in spite of you know, just because people are busy, these things don't happen leading to lower collection rates and longer collection cycles. So I think there's just a huge area that's dying to be, you know, enhanced and improved. Right. And that's what we've been working on.

 

04:36

Now. That's great context. And also I can say even probably from personal experience that sometimes these messages, they don't also prompt you to action. They they are meant to prompt you to action, but there are probably so many steps involved. You may have to you see the message and you might have to go into an app or you might have to go into a website. Or you have to go physically to pay a bill. That it's not Have a smooth flow. And that might also lead people to sort of take their own time doing it. And that brings in a lot of the inefficiency. So now that we sort of understand the challenge here, like, how is it that conditional messaging can help this, this whole sequence of events become more efficient and effective for payments?

 

05:20

Yeah, so one way to think about the current process, right is, you know, let me call it a 10 Click process, right, which is you get a reminder, right, typically an SMS message. And then if you are in a meeting, you say, I'll think about it later, or, because because it takes a lot of steps, you're like, Okay, you know, I can kind of do it when I'm busy. But then, or if you have time, you sort of then go to the payment app. Right? So and then within the payment app, you look up the merchant, you look up the maybe the invoice number, and then you add the amount, you put all of that in, then you authorise the payment, and then sort of the the payment goes out. And in the process, you've done a tonne of typing, you know, sort of like a 10 Click process, right, and just a lot of overhead. And it may not sound like a lot except that, you know, let's not forget, we do this, you know, dozens of time times every month. And it's critical, it's essential, these bills have to get paid, and just a lot of work. Right. So I think the solution really, that we've come up with, is to make it essentially a one click Bill Pay process, literally, you know, you see the message, it has a payment link in it, all you do is you know, click on it, and then authorise it, chances are you can do maybe a fingerprint, right, or whatever mechanism you have on your phone. I mean, that's it really then that one click to authorise the payment is is all you're doing. And, of course, to make it work, there's some magic underneath, and we'll talk about it. But the idea, the big idea is if we can shrink this sort of 10 Click process to a one click process. I think it can work wonders, right? It is great, because from a convenience and ease of use standpoint, the consumer benefits tremendously, right? They see these messages, they can quickly do it even in you know, they might be busy doing something else watching TV or in a business meeting or whatever it is. And you can say, Oh, yeah, let me just do it. Right. So it's very quick and convenient for the consumer. And because they be on time, very likely they don't incur those penalties. And, and certainly from the business standpoint, This improves collection rate rates, it improves collection cycles, it fundamentally improves cash flow, and you know, the velocity of business and all good things that come from that. So that's the the idea,

 

07:48

right? And if we and I know that, you know, there is there are already solutions in place to make those ideas a reality. And gupshup has a one one click Bill Pay solution. So if I can invite you to just, you know, walk us through a vision of how this looks like like, let's say I receive a payment reminder, from, let's say utility, how is that payment reminder translating into a payment? How does that work?

 

08:15

Yeah, yeah. So I think Firstly, this is this is part of gupshup vision of, of conversational messaging, right? Meaning, each message is no longer just, you know, a bunch of plain text characters that ask the remind, remind the user to do something, or to notify the user or something like that, right? It is, the goal is to make every message meaningful, interactive, actionable, conversational, to accomplish the purpose. And in this case, we're talking about payment messages. So you're taking a plain text, notification message and converting it into a payment message. So let's talk about how that happens. Right. And then the cool thing is, you know, we do this, without the merchant having to change anything at all stripes, the merchant is still doing, sending the same kind of text message reminders, but gupshup sort of takes that message, which until yesterday, would would go to the user has just a simple plain text message with a 10 Click process. But now, you know, gupshup transforms that message into a one click billpay message, which then, you know, leads to quick payments. And really what happens in the middle is, there's sort of two components here. One is an AI capability. And the other is payment integrations. So the AI component looks at the message, extracts all the key information from the message, right? Who's the merchant? What's the invoice number, what's the amount, what's the purpose, and things like that? Right. So and and to get those AI models work. We've done some extensive training, we have sort of very rich data sets to train our AI to figure out you know, reliably Because you know, you can't have errors in something as important as this. So it can extract out all of that information from the message, right? That's the first thing, first step. And then the second step is based on all of that, we construct a an intelligent, sort of link, right with all of this information embedded in there. And we worked with the payment providers, multiple payment providers to make this very simple and automatic. And one of the most important things, by the way, is when the payment is made, you know, gupshup, gets notified as well, so that we can send the confirmation message right there. Right. So I think, so we had to work with payment providers to enable some special capabilities. But But between these two components, the the AI capability and the payment integration, the net result of that is that you you get this message with the one click Bill Pay capability, right? It's a it's a smart payment message. And when that message goes to the user, all the user has to do is click the button, authorise the payment gupshup gets notified confirms the payment. The merchant gets the payment, everything is tied to tied together the amount, the invoice number, the the merchant ID, you know, everything and just just work sort of flawlessly and automatically. Right. So that's the that's really the power of conversational messaging where you you sort of embed a lot of intelligence in the message itself. So that it is you know, it has a lot of context. It's self aware, it's actionable, it's interactive, it's really conversational. And I think that's really very powerful example, you know, this one click bill pay is a very powerful example of what conversational messaging into for business consumers.

 

11:50

Now, that's great. And I think the the other question I have is, just for any potential users of this listening is the transformation of a payment reminder into a payment message, I'm assuming is done quite seamlessly, without requiring too much of change from the customers and to their work requires no

 

12:07

change at all. Yeah, no change at all. On the merchant side, it's the same API call. In fact, as far as the merchant is concerned, they're still sending payment reminders. Right, exactly. That's the beauty of it. Yeah. But but then gupshup, does all of this work in the middle, converts it into a smart man smart payment message. And really, from a enterprise standpoint, they were doing exactly the same as they were, until yesterday. But now, suddenly, the collection rates are higher, collection cycles are shorter, it's really, you know, transfer. transformative, and it's extremely high ROI simply because there's no effort, there's no cost. So return on invested effort, which is the effort is zero, the return is, you know, obviously, incredibly high. And here, it's a very demonstrable financial impact in terms of collection cycles and collection rates. So this is such a, such a no brainer for businesses that are that, you know, are in this business of constantly collecting payments from consumers on a monthly basis, all of these recurring payments, suddenly, it's great for the merchants and great for the consumers as well makes it very easy and convenient.

 

13:20

And in terms of the response that you're already seeing from customers, I'm assuming that there are companies across verticals, who are sort of beginning to get excited about this and adopters.

 

13:30

Yeah, I think, you know, since we announced it, I think we've started seeing a lot of interest. I think there are some credit card companies, there are, you know, some utilities, you know, some sort of FinTech players, you know, with collections and medic, lending issues. Very, very interested in this. So I think all of that is is happening, and scaling up very nicely. I think we will announce these names soon as well as soon as they are ready. But I think there's a lot of activity and a lot of work going on.

 

14:00

Perfect, thank you so much, as always beautiful insights. And for our listeners out there. I hope this was informative. And hopefully it's inspired you to start looking at your own payment collection process and see how it can be transformed with the conversational messaging. So thanks again, once again, for joining. And we will join you all on our next episode where we'll talk about another cool innovation, that conversational messaging is springing up. Thank you. Sounds good. Thanks.