Many organizations pride themselves on offering sleek, customer-friendly payment experiences. Mobile-first design? Check. Multiple payment options? Check. Seamless checkout? Check.

But even the most polished front-end experience can shift from self-service to support when customers encounter friction or need help. What should have been a 10-cent self-service payment can become an $8 live-agent call—an 80x cost increase for the exact same transaction, according to Gartner.

Each of those calls adds expense. Agent-assisted payments and manual interventions erode profitability and expose a weak link in the payment journey: the support experience. While every issue begins with a single frustrated customer, the real damage is cumulative—hidden inside the workflows intended to keep the process running smoothly.

The hidden cost of a poor support experience

Most inefficiencies stem from a common blind spot: organizations invest heavily in customer-facing design while overlooking the support experience—where friction truly becomes expensive.

Consider this: A call center agent answers a call. The customer is anxious—they made a payment yesterday, but their account doesn’t reflect the payment has been made. The agent toggles between multiple systems to verify the transaction, only to discover the payment posted to the wrong account. They transfer the call to another department, open a manual exception ticket and promise a resolution within 48 hours.

That five-minute call consumes the time of two agents, adds to your exception queue and undermines the customer’s trust in your organization. Multiply that scenario by hundreds or thousands of calls per month, and the cost impact becomes impossible to ignore—especially since these moments happen daily in organizations that consider their payments experience “optimized.”

But what’s broken isn’t necessarily the customer experience—it’s the disconnected systems and processes that support it.

Fixing the support experience isn’t just about efficiency

Improving support isn’t just about faster answers—it’s about equipping teams with the right tools and insights to resolve issues quickly and completely. When support staff have real-time visibility into payment data and can act without switching between systems or escalating calls, they can reduce call times, improve resolution rates and ultimately lower the total cost of payment acceptance.

Even with efficient support operations, payment challenges persist when the process remains fragmented across teams and systems. Payment Experience Management addresses that fragmentation by unifying customers, support and operations into one connected payment journey.

It’s designed to remove friction for customers, equip support teams with tools to shorten calls and speed resolution, and give operations the visibility to simplify reconciliation and reduce cost-to-serve. By optimizing all three, organizations can accelerate payments, improve cash flow, and lower their total cost of acceptance.

But creating that connected experience requires the right technology. To fix poor payment experiences, organizations need more than better processes; they need smarter, integrated tools that automate more of the payment experience end-to-end.

Smarter tools, faster resolutions

Integrated, intelligent AI agents can handle routine tasks—such as verifying payment status—so staff can focus on higher-value customer interactions.

This type of automation reduces call volume, accelerates resolution times and improves cash flow. It’s not about replacing people; it’s about freeing them from repetitive work so they can address the complex situations where human judgment adds value.

According to Zendesk, the industry is moving toward a world where 80% of customer inquiries are resolved without human-agent intervention, and 70% of customer experience leaders say generative AI is making every digital interaction more efficient.

This shift delivers:

• Lower call volumes and reduced support costs
• Fewer exceptions through accurate, automated workflows
• Faster resolutions that improve satisfaction for both customers and staff

When routine work runs automatically and staff can focus on high-touch customer interactions, organizations cut support costs, improve payment completion and strengthen every step of the customer journey.

Real-world impact: Measurable savings

These efficiencies extend well beyond the contact center—lowering support costs across the entire payment operation. For organizations managing thousands—or millions—of payments each month, small inefficiencies multiply quickly. A 10% reduction in call volume, faster reconciliation or fewer exceptions can yield measurable savings.

By automating routine interactions, teams can redirect their time toward more complex issues. The result? Faster payments, fewer exceptions and a lower total cost of acceptance.

Payment experience as a competitive advantage

When organizations view payments as a connected experience rather than a series of isolated steps, they can transform everyday transactions into a competitive advantage. Optimization doesn’t end when the payment posts; it extends into every workflow and team supporting it.

By adopting a Payment Experience Management framework, organizations can get paid faster, reduce costs and deliver a better payment experience for both customers and staff. When customers and support teams work seamlessly together, success stops being the exception—and becomes the standard.