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