Making voice authorisations easier to manage
- Introducing the Interactive Voice Recognition Service (IVR) and how it works
- Speed up your transaction processing
- IVR is easy to use and offers straightforward menu options
What is the IVR service?
When you process a card payment electronically, in the majority of instances your terminal will automatically communicate with the card issuer for authorisation; however, on occasion your terminal may prompt you to call our authorisation service. This could be, for example, because the card issuer wishes to check the security of the card.
There may also be situations where you choose to call the authorisation service without having received a prompt; for example, if you are suspicious of a particular transaction attempt, or if your terminal isn’t working and you are using manual vouchers.
How does it work?
The basics
To speed up your transaction processing, our authorisation department operates an automated facility. This enables you to ‘self serve’ or to capture relevant data before your call is transferred to one of our Customer Service Advisors.
The system is easy to use and offers straightforward menu options to ensure that your calls are processed correctly - this incorporates voice recognition and touch tone technology, allowing you to input the information in the way that suits you best.
Speeding it up
The system also incorporates a ‘barge-in’ facility. For example, as the system begins to ask for a transaction type you can immediately respond with “Standard Authorisation” (or any of the other choices offered).
You do not have to wait for the system to list all the available options if you already know what your input will be (see the enclosed page for touchtone options). This facility is available on all of the prompts.
What if it doesn’t recognise your voice?
If you do encounter a voice recognition problem, the system will give you an “Error Recovery” instruction, i.e. it will stipulate what you need to do next. It is very important that you don’t ‘barge-in’ at this point as this facility is disabled whilst the instruction message is being played.
At the end of the message you can either key in or repeat the information; however, in order to maximise your ability to navigate through the system, at this point we recommend that you key enter the details.
The system will attempt to recover recognition errors twice, but if you continue to experience difficulties your call will be routed to a Customer Service Advisor.
Received a chargeback?
When the system has captured all of the transaction data, you will be advised of the authorisation decision. If the transaction is a referral or a Name and Address Check, your call (together with the data captured) will be transferred to a Customer Service Advisor.
We do hope that you have found this information useful; by successfully navigating through the automated system you will speed up the authorisation process at your point of sale and avoid the need to transfer to a Customer Service Advisor.
Should you have any further questions, please do not hesitate to call us on 0844 822 2000 for authorisation requests or 0844 811 4440 for a Name and Address Check; our Customer Service Advisors are available to assist you 24hrs a day.
