From Conversation to Action: How PayNearMe’s AI Agent Transforms Servicing and Collections

Collecting a payment can involve a lot more than completing a transaction. Customers call to check account details and make payments. Support teams handle those calls and make outbound calls about failed or past-due payments. 

Each interaction may be routine, but when it falls on your support team to handle every step, increasing servicing or collections volume can mean increasing staffing along with it. This is part of the reason why payment-related support can be one of the most expensive parts of accepting payments. In PayNearMe’s The Payment Experience Gap report, support is the largest of the three modeled cost areas, at $2.70 per payment. 

That makes payment-related assistance an important part of the total cost of acceptance and not simply a contact center expense. Which creates a difficult challenge: how do you reach and serve more customers without driving up your cost to serve?

That’s why our first focus for agentic AI is helping customers resolve routine payment needs through self-service and proactive engagement. PayNearMe’s AI Servicing and Collections Agent, built directly into PayXM™, helps automate routine inbound servicing and proactive outbound engagement while giving customers a direct path toward resolution or payment.

The result is more capacity for routine servicing and collections without additional headcount while your team focuses its time where human assistance matters most. This is Payment Experience Management (PEM) in action—continuously improving the entire payment journey to make payments easier for customers and reduce the total cost of acceptance for businesses.

AI that does more than talk

A natural conversation is useful, but a customer who calls to make a payment still needs a way to complete it. If automation answers a question but leaves the next step to your team, the manual workload remains.

Agentic AI can help close that gap. With access to relevant payment data, business rules and workflows, an agent can understand what a customer needs, determine an appropriate next step and take action within the limits your business sets.

For servicing and collections, that could mean confirming account information, helping a customer make or schedule a payment or connecting them with a person who can provide additional assistance.

The opportunity is to help customers asking for assistance resolve their payment needs in self-service channels, with your team involved where human judgment matters most.

AI built into the payment experience

PayNearMe’s new AI Servicing and Collections Agent puts that approach into practice. We built the Agent directly into PayXM™, where it can use payment data, business rules and workflows to connect routine inbound servicing and proactive outbound engagement with payment actions.

That connection matters. A conversation about a past-due payment is more useful when the customer can schedule a payment during the interaction. A request for assistance is easier to move forward when the Agent can transfer the customer to support with the conversation’s full context.

For your business, the goal is more capacity to serve customers and collect payments without requiring your team to handle every routine step or add additional support members.

From conversation to action

The objective isn’t automation for automation’s sake. It’s giving more routine interactions a path to resolution without requiring support staff to handle every step.

For inbound interactions, the Agent can help customers complete routine servicing tasks such as checking account information, confirming a due date or making a payment. If the interaction requires human assistance, the Agent can transfer the customer to support with the full context of the conversation. This includes a summary within the Agent Interface in PayXM.

For outbound engagement, the Agent can proactively contact customers about payment-related needs and guide them toward the appropriate next step. Depending on the interaction, that could include making or scheduling a payment, sending a PayNearMe Smart Link™ or connecting the customer with a support team member with the full context of the conversation.

Because the AI Servicing and Collections Agent is built directly into PayXM, it can connect conversations with the payment data, business rules and workflows needed to move an interaction forward.

Greater outreach capacity in practice

Indiana Finance Company tested the AI Servicing and Collections Agent in a pilot supporting proactive payment outreach and inbound customer interactions.

During one outbound campaign, the Agent placed as many calls in one hour as approximately 28 support staff members would typically place during the same period. Ninety percent of targeted accounts received a voicemail or Smart Link, completed a live conversation or were transferred to support staff.

Those results demonstrate the potential to expand outreach capacity without the same increase in manual calling. Customers had more opportunities to take the next step toward payment or assistance.

As Carl Stamper, chief operating officer at Indiana Finance Company, explained: 

“The AI Agent gives us the reach of a much larger team and lets us adjust the pace of campaigns based on our needs. It gives our customers a direct path to payment, while our staff can focus on situations where personal attention matters most.”

Advancing Payment Experience Management with agentic AI

PayNearMe’s approach to PEM is built on a simple idea: optimizing every step of the payment journey, across customer experience, support and operations, to help businesses collect payments on time, reduce friction and lower operational costs.

With new agentic AI capabilities embedded into the PayXM platform, PayNearMe is extending that vision by helping businesses keep more payment related support in the self-service channel. 

The AI Servicing and Collections Agent is also just the first in PayNearMe’s agentic AI roadmap. We plan to introduce additional purpose-built agents to address complex payment challenges, reduce manual work and help lower the total cost of acceptance.

Expand your team’s capacity to resolve payment needs

The AI Servicing and Collections Agent is available now to PayNearMe clients.

Learn more about the AI Servicing and Collections Agent and request a demo.