Most Payment Calls Aren't Service Requests, They're Self-Service Failures
A while back, the head of customer experience at a consumer lender told us he thought his lender's phone system had broken because call center volume had dropped to practically zero.
Nothing was broken. The business fixed its payment experience and the phones stopped ringing.
This real-life scenario exposes the distinction between the calls your customers need to make and the avoidable calls they are forced to make when they can't successfully self-pay.
In most contact centers, payment-related calls get a disposition code—payment inquiry, billing, account access—and roll into overall call volume. The code tells you what the call was about, but not whether it should have happened in the first place.
With the exception of hardship calls, many payment-related contacts should be classified as failure-demand: a term coined by British management thinker John Seddon for demand created when an organization fails to do something right for the customer. Also known as avoidable contact, failure demand accounts for an estimated 40 percent to 60 percent of total customer demand in conventional service organizations, according to Seddon's consultancy, Vanguard.
Payment Experience Problems Driving Avoidable Support Calls
Harvard Business Review has reported that across industries, 81 percent of customers try to handle matters themselves before reaching a live representative. Viewed through that lens, a payment-related call is rarely the customer's first attempt. More often, it is the next step after a self-service payment journey breaks down.
Roughly 20 percent of all payments are abandoned or not completed at the moment the customer intended to pay, which leads to a high volume of support calls. One chief financial officer told us that it wasn't unusual for four support team members to manually facilitate 800 payments a day. This is an expensive problem that's completely avoidable.
What do the vast majority of these inbound calls have in common? A poor payment experience. For example, when we asked consumers what makes payment difficult, 42 percent said remembering logins, passwords, and account numbers; 21 percent said they have trouble navigating biller websites, and nearly one-third (32 percent) pointed to having to repeatedly enter card or bank account information. That last one carries a cost beyond irritation. Manual entry increases the risk of errors that can affect account status or lead to disputes.
Our modeling reinforces the connection between payment friction and support costs. Four of the five biggest drivers originate from problems the business can address: assisted payment completion, failed payment troubleshooting, login and access issues, and payment-related inquiries. Only the fifth—billing and payment concerns, including hardship—describes a call the customer would have made regardless of the payment experience.
The financial impact is substantial. Across the U.S. bill pay market, businesses spend more than $100 billion a year on payment costs beyond transaction fees. For every $1.20 spent processing a payment, another $6.02 is spent completing it, making the total cost of acceptance roughly six times what most businesses measure. Customer support accounts for approximately $45 billion of that market-wide total, much of it tied to avoidable payment-related calls. For a single organization processing 500,000 payments a year, those avoidable expenses can reach approximately $3 million.
Four Ways to Eliminate Payment-Related Failure Demand
When it comes to failure demand, businesses can remove the cost by eliminating the reasons customers need to call. The following four changes can make the greatest difference:
- Remove the login. Nearly a third of consumers (31 percent) say bill payment would be easier if they could pay without logging in or entering an account number. So don't make them. Personalized, secure and pre-authenticated payment links sent by text, email or digital wallet notification or printed on the statement as a QR code can take customers directly to their payment flows. Eliminating the login removes one of the most common drivers of support calls, and ultimately, costs.
- Pre-populate everything. Eight in 10 consumers say it matters that their payment details, including loan number and amount due, are pre-filled. So why not give it to them? Self-service only reduces costs when customers can complete the task. Asking them to provide information the business already has adds effort, creates more opportunities for error, and increases the likelihood that the journey will end with an agent at 80 times the cost of a self-service payment.
- Give them a living bill. More than one-third of consumers (35 percent) want to store bills in their Apple or Google wallets. Once saved, the bill can stay current with the latest statement, payment details, and transaction history. This "living bill" answers the basic question: "How much do I owe?," before the customer needs to call and ask.
- Answer with AI. Some calls will still come. An intelligent virtual agent can recognize intent and resolve routine requests, like make a payment, change a due date, or check a balance end to end so the only calls that reach a live agent actually require support from your service team.
The lender whose phones went quiet did not set out to eliminate every call. It eliminated the friction that forced customers to call for help with routine payments they could have completed on their own. By shifting those interactions to effective self-service, the lender freed its staff to focus on customers who genuinely needed high-touch support.
That is what makes failure demand different from every other line item in a contact center budget: you do not simply manage or negotiate it down; you engineer out its underlying causes. The goal is not a silent contact center. It is a contact center where agents can spend their time on the conversations that truly require their expertise.
Steve Kramer is vice president of product at PayNearMe. With more than 25 years of experience in payments and product innovation, he is focused on advancing PayNearMe's approach to Payment Experience Management, optimizing every touchpoint across the payment journey for customers, agents and operations. By removing friction, expanding payment choice and streamlining processes end to end, he helps ensure PayNearMe delivers seamless, reliable payment experiences that accelerate payments and lower the total cost of acceptance.