New analysis by Datatel highlights how examining the flow of phone payments can help organizations identify operational friction, as well as opportunities for payment.
Miami, United States (PRUnderground) August 19th, 2026
Datatel Communications Inc./Datatel Inc., a provider of IVR Payments and secure payment automation technology, today announced a new analysis examining the operational impact of staff-assisted phone payments using the company's Payment Flow Intelligence Framework™.
The analysis focuses on a common payment process that often receives limited operational attention: what happens when customers call an organization, and employees become directly involved in collecting payments.
For many organizations, accepting a payment over the phone is viewed as a relatively simple transaction. A customer calls, an employee collects the required information, the payment is processed, and the account is updated.
But viewed as a flow of money through the organization, the process can be considerably more complex.
Each payment may involve staff time, call handling, customer authentication, payment data entry, movement between systems, transaction confirmation, account updates, exception handling and PCI compliance considerations. Individually, these activities may appear minor. Across hundreds or thousands of transactions, however, they can become a significant operational workflow.
Looking Beyond the Payment Transaction
Datatel's analysis applies its Payment Flow Intelligence Framework™ to examine the complete journey surrounding a staff-assisted phone payment rather than focusing solely on the payment transaction itself.
The framework begins with a straightforward question:
How does money actually move through the organization?
In the case of phone payments, that means examining what happens from the moment a customer decides to make a payment through the point at which the payment is completed and reflected in the organization's systems.
The analysis considers several areas, including:
- How customers initiate phone payments.
- How much employee involvement is required to complete a transaction.
- Where payment information is manually entered or transferred.
- Whether employees interact directly with cardholder data.
- How payments move between telephone, payment and billing systems.
- How failed or incomplete transactions are handled.
- Whether payment demand contributes to call queues or periods of higher staff workload.
- Where automation could remove unnecessary manual steps.
The objective is not simply to determine whether an organization can accept payments by phone. It is to understand the operational process required to make those payments happen.
Staff-Assisted Payments Can Create Hidden Operational Work
One of the challenges with staff-assisted payment processes is that their true operational cost can be difficult to see.
The employee handling the payment may already be part of a customer service, billing, accounts receivable, or contact center team. As a result, payment collection can become embedded within everyday responsibilities rather than being measured as a separate operational process.
That can make the cumulative impact easy to underestimate.
Time spent collecting card information, entering payment details, waiting for authorizations, confirming transactions and dealing with payment exceptions is time that employees cannot spend resolving more complex customer issues or performing other higher-value activities.
The issue becomes particularly important when payment volumes increase or when customers attempt to make payments outside normal business hours.
IVR Payments as a Payment Flow Improvement
Datatel's analysis identifies IVR Payments as one method organizations can use to redesign this portion of the payment flow.
Rather than requiring an employee to collect payment information, an automated IVR payment system allows customers to make payments through the telephone using a self-service process.
Customers can call, authenticate where required, enter their payment information, and receive confirmation without requiring an employee to manually handle the transaction.
The result is a change in the underlying workflow, as opposed to simply adding yet another payment channel.
Moving appropriate transactions from staff-assisted collection to IVR Payments can reduce repetitive payment handling, expand self-service availability, and allow employees to concentrate on situations where human assistance provides greater value.
It can also help organizations reduce employee interaction with payment card information, an important consideration when examining PCI scope, and payment security.
Understanding How Money Moves™
Datatel developed the Payment Flow Intelligence Framework™ to help organizations examine payment operations as interconnected business processes rather than isolated technologies or payment channels.
The framework follows four stages:
Understand → Prioritize → Modernize → Optimize
For phone payments, the first step is understanding the current flow: why customers call, what employees must do to complete the payment, where manual intervention occurs, and where operational friction exists.
Organizations can then prioritize the areas creating the greatest burden, modernize appropriate portions of the workflow through technologies such as IVR Payments, and continue optimizing the process based on how customers actually use the payment channel.
"Organizations often look at the technology processing the transaction without looking closely enough at everything that has to happen around it," said Barnard Crespi, Co-CEO of Datatel Communications Inc. "When you follow the payment from the customer's decision to pay through to completion, you begin to see the staff involvement, manual processes and operational dependencies that were previously hidden. That is where meaningful opportunities for automation often emerge."
For Datatel, this represents a broader shift in how organizations can approach payment modernization.
The starting point is not simply asking whether a payment system should be replaced.
It is Understanding How Money Moves™ and determining where the movement of money is creating unnecessary work, risk or friction.
Direct Links:
> Understanding How Money Moves™ Executive Session > https://www.datatel-systems.com/money-flow-session/
> Payment Flow Intelligence Framework™ > https://www.datatel-systems.com/services/
> IVR Payments > https://www.datatel-systems.com/ivr-payments/
About Datatel
Datatel is a payment technology and advisory company that helps organizations modernize how they securely accept and manage payments. For more than 25 years, Datatel has specialized in secure payment infrastructure, IVR payment technology, and PCI compliance advisory services that reduce the risks associated with handling payment card data. As more organizations introduce AI technologies into customer interactions, Datatel helps ensure payment transactions remain isolated, secure, and compliant by protecting Voice AI and other automated systems from directly handling sensitive cardholder data. Datatel's solutions are used by healthcare providers, utilities, financial services organizations, and government agencies across North America.
Lean more: https://www.datatel-systems.com/
