IVR Payments using KooKoo-Part 1

It has always been our vision to be the platform of choice for telephony application developers. Now that the core platform has stabilized over the past year we are looking at improving the ecosystem by providing more services on top of the telephony platform.
Payments have been a big problem in India. A lot of transactions in India actually end with cash on delivery. An innovative new startup called Gharpay has come up with a solution for the offline payment collection problem. In their own words

Gharpay is a doorstep cash payment network. Accepting cash payments was painful before we started with the mission of making it easy for you and your customers.

Most of your customers don't want to or can't pay you online. Accepting cash through Gharpay means more people can pay you and you don't have to change any process flow.

Please visit their site to get more information on how they work.

We at KooKoo immediately saw a synergy and thought that it would be really good if we could have a call to pay kind of feature. So we started collaborating with Gharpay and have integrated with the KooKoo services. You can now have an IVR system which ends with a payment collection order to complete the full circle.

Example:

Lets say, you provide some service to your customers, like, DTH service or cable service. You can now have a call to pay feature. Just publish your KooKoo number. When your customers call, you can query the database and playback something like "Thank you for calling Mr.Ajay. Your current bill is Rs.450. Please press 1 to pay". When the customer presses 1, KooKoo integrates with Gharpay to raise a payment order. Gharpay then collects the money on your behalf and deposits in your account. The collection happens within 24 hours. In fact, you can use KooKoo to even make an outbound call alert to your customer to remind him to pay and collect the payment. The whole cycle is now automated.

How to get started?

The following is the flow:

1. Customers sign up with Gharpay and get their credentials.
2. KooKoo exposes a pay tag to you.
3. Customers fill up the pay tag with the XML that Gharpay expects.
4. KooKoo posts the XML on behalf of the customer and creates the order.
5. Customers can manage the order from Gharpay portal.
So what are you waiting for, ask your customers to start <pay>ing.

Note: Gharpay does not deliver goods and should be used only for payment collection.

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