We originally were building vertical voice agents for fitness centers. During customer conversations, the idea of collecting payment during the call (via SMS link, keypad, or voice) would sometimes come up as something that might be useful.
We’re trying to understand how people have approached this in practice.
If you’ve worked on production voice systems or payments, I had a few questions: 1) Have you implemented in-call payment flows? 2) What tradeoffs or issues did you run into (compliance, reliability, etc.)? 3) Was it something customers actually used, or mostly ignored?
We also noticed a YC F24 company (Protegee) explored this space and later pivoted, which makes us curious what lessons people took away from that generation of attempts.
Appreciate any real-world experience or pointers. We’re trying to learn from folks who’ve actually shipped this.
dankwizard•3w ago
Our IVR was replaced with an AI virtual agent that is a combination of answering questions but mostly sending calls to the right place.
If it is something like updating payment details or paying an invoice, they are transferred out of AI into a typical architect IVR flow (secured, no dtmf tones etc) and request their details in the specific order.
There is no way we would get sign off to feed customer credit card information into any AI model.