According to research from McKinsey, AI adoption has more than doubled since 2017, with companies that invest heavily (and smartly) in AI finding themselves ahead of their competitors in crowded markets. AI, it seems, can have a powerful impact on any industry when applied strategically, and billing is no exception.

In the dawn of what some are calling the “Payments 3.0 Era,” customer expectations for service, frictionless transactions, and personalization are higher than ever, and AI can help meet those demands.

Here are four ways the team at Gotransverse envisions artificial intelligence changing the payments game for businesses and customers alike.

Efficient, Personalized Service for Every Customer

With surveys finding that 86 percent of consumers prefer to interact with humans than chatbots, the idea of AI taking over customer service entirely is still far-fetched. However, it can be a powerful member of the customer service team.

Because AI can quickly get a holistic view of large volumes of data and customer interactions—a perspective that would take humans ages to cobble together—it can learn consumer behaviors quite effectively. When straightforward questions come up, it can use the patterns it’s identified to offer resolutions, and when more complicated billing disputes arise, it can use what it’s learned to offer data-drive recommendations to its human customer service counterparts.

Today’s customers are often looking for self-service billing experiences that give them both full transparency and total control over their payments. Here again, artificial intelligence can help by directing customers through the self-service process and to the right payment channels, lowering operations expenses and making every step of the billing experience a breeze.

Enhanced Collections Processes Leave No Money on the Table

Revenue leakage is a constant drain on businesses, and a large part of that is lost income from unpaid invoices. In fact, a study by PYMNTS found that 49 percent of invoices produced by US businesses will eventually become overdue.

AI has the potential to help with collections in multiple ways. It can look at communication strategies around billing to identify which ones are most successful at soliciting on-time payments. For example, do more customers pay on time when they’re reminded one month before the due date or two weeks? Does a second nudge help or hurt? Do incentives for on-time payment move the needle more than “punishments” for late payments? AI can sift through the data and glean these insights much more quickly than the billing team can (and they have more important things to do, anyway), ultimately enabling you to create and implement a successful, data-driven collections and dunning strategy.

It can also study payment patterns to identify (and help you head off) habitually late payers, or create business rules to automatically require checks, for example, from clients whose credit cards are habitually expired or whose ACH payments frequently fail. The more that can be automated—and the more problems that can be solved before they happen—with the help of AI, the more smoothly the whole billing system functions.

Smarter & More Confident Internal Decision Making

Businesses collect more data today than ever before, but without an efficient way to mine that data for valuable insights, it’s not worth much in the day to day. Artificial intelligence can help here, too, sorting through the data you’ve collected to highlight important insights or patterns that reveal opportunities for optimization.

These insights could lead to improved back-office operations, new sales strategies, and even new product and service offerings based on nuances of customer behavior that would’ve been impossible to identify quickly without technological support. These insights can even identify potential sources of problems and fix (or enable your team to fix) them before they cause snags.

Vault-Like Security

As part of its advanced data analysis capabilities, as we know, AI is able to pick up on complex patterns that would be hard for humans to suss out on their own. But it goes even further: by identifying when those patterns are broken in unusual ways, it can spot fraud—or even just vulnerabilities—quickly enough to mitigate the fallout.

With the additional security coverage AI can provide, businesses can rest easier that their own financial data—and all of their customers’ financial data—is well protected.

Preparing for the New Age of Billing

As technology empowers businesses to meet customers’ ever-more-complex demands, savvy companies are implementing billing systems designed to catapult them into the digital age, equipped not only with the latest capabilities but also with the ability to support future growth in an evolving market.

The Gotransverse platform was built with future-thinking, growth-oriented businesses in mind. To learn more about how we can bring your billing processes into the digital age (and even into “Payments 3.0”), take a tour of our platform today. Then, when you’re ready, contact us to schedule a complimentary demo.