Sierra, Bret Taylor's AI customer service company, has partnered with Stripe so its voice agents can accept payments during a phone call. The caller types the card number on the keypad, the details go straight to Stripe, and the agent only sees the payment status and the last four digits. Medical billing firm Cedar is an early user, and Sierra is now also listed in Stripe's App Marketplace.

What it means: Payment is often where an automated service call breaks down: the customer is transferred to another system, sent a link or asked to call back. The partnership solves that step with a familiar mechanism, keypad entry, which keeps card details away from the agent. That matters for PCI DSS compliance, because the fewer systems touch the card number, the lower the risk and the cost of audits. Cedar's figures show that when a patient starts a payment during the call, the large majority of cases are completed, which translates directly into faster collection. For utilities, telecoms, insurers or collection agencies, the use case is obvious. In Europe, where card-not-present payments fall under strong authentication rules, phone payments have a special status, so deployment will need careful configuration. The news also shows Stripe steadily building infrastructure for every kind of agent payment, from chat to phone, so it is not left out of this market.

Read the original on The Next Web

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