Can you conceive of a more complex business than payments?
AI isn’t smart enough
With a crowded ecosystem, a tangled web of technologies and providers, and so much scope for a transaction to fail, the payment business can be a real minefield – especially for smaller merchants with limited in-house expertise.
Against this background, the wholesale move to automated, AI-powered customer service is doing the market a disservice reckons Vienna-based DIMOCO.
We recently caught up with Bernd Pichler, the firm’s Head of Sales for Cards and Alternative Payment Methods, to find out more.
Most people see AI as the future. Does DIMOCO disagree?
We’re strong believers in the promise of AI. Our teams use it across the business in many ways – like coding, diagnosing technical issues, driving efficiencies in our sales and marketing operations, and much more besides.
But, when it comes to customer service, we treat AI with extreme caution. That’s partly because we don’t believe it’s smart enough to truly understand the nuances of a typical customer support enquiry.
And it’s partly because the DIMOCO model is predicated on personal service. Dedicated account managers are expected and empowered to understand the merchant, their sector, and the payment issues they face. It’s also their job to run regular health checks and look for opportunities to turn payments not just into revenue, but also into opportunity.
Behind the scenes, AI may help them to do that job. But we can’t see it replacing that job.
So, from a customer service perspective, what do you see as the limitations of AI?
In the world of payments, almost every customer support inquiry is a complex inquiry. To compound matters, many inquiries are also urgent and business critical.
Yet, today, AI systems struggle to understand complex language or nonverbal cues. They also lack the emotional intelligence to handle sensitive situations or empathise with customers.
But it goes wider and deeper than the ability of AI to diagnose and solve a given technical issue. Ultimately, we see every customer support inquiry as a growth opportunity – an opportunity to understand a merchant’s business better, uncover and fix any underlying issues with their payment set-up, meet their needs more effectively, and help them deliver a better service to more customers.
That’s how we manage and grow our business. It’s what we do. We won’t delegate that core task to an AI bot. Nor will we delegate it to an outsourced or offshore customer support provider. It’s too precious.
With so many payment players embracing AI, do you see yourselves as a lone voice?
For a while we were in a lonely place. But there’s a growing backlash.
In a recent Gartner survey, 64% of people said they would prefer companies not to use AI in their customer service, and 53% said they hate the idea so much they would consider switching to a competitor.[1]
Looking specifically at the payments sector, Klarna was famously an AI evangelist, but has now evolved its approach and backtracked – by going back to hiring real people in customer service and emphasising the importance of investing in the quality of human support.[2]
Presumably, high-quality customer support is expensive. Isn’t this reflected in your prices?
Delivering a personalised, high-quality service doesn’t need to cost more. Often, it can cost less.
The fact is that – inadvertently and unknowingly – many merchants, especially smaller businesses, have a highly complex payment set up.
When you look into the details, you realise they are working with a referring partner, who is connected to an independent sales organisation, who is connected to some type of a gateway, who is connected to an acquirer.
Each of these layers has its own vested interests and may be adding unnecessary complexity and cost. So, it is probably more sensible to cut out the middlemen and work directly with an acquirer who can connect them to multiple payment methods.
Also, it goes back to the DIMOCO model. Our heritage is in working with merchant sectors that many acquirers are cautious of. This has given us an unusual depth of payment experience.
And it means we have always understood problematic payments, we have always taken a consultative approach with our customers, and we have always looked to design a bespoke payment setup that will work for them.
In other words, personal service has always been core to our business. And, as we have grown, we have scaled up and industrialised this approach.
With this background and this model, we are ideally equipped to take our expertise and our approach more widely, with an emphasis on merchant sectors which receive a poor service from most acquirers, as well as rapidly growing, scale-up businesses.
Do you risk putting too much emphasis on customer support? Afterall, for most merchants, 99.999% of transactions will always flow through without any problems?
You can never put too much emphasis on customer support, especially in a business-critical sector like payments.
No matter how slick your payment set-up, there’s always room for improvement – perhaps by finding new ways to optimise e-commerce conversion rates, or reaching more customers with alternative payment methods, or understanding and addressing the precise reasons why some transactions fail.
In our world, customer support is never just about fixing a single isolated issue. It’s about understanding the nuances of every merchant’s business and ensuring their payment set-up is the best it can be.
In the world of digital commerce, it’s often assumed that big is beautiful. In fact, we believe that, instead of working with one of the payment processing giants, many businesses would be better off working with a smaller, hungrier, more agile partner like DIMOCO – which need not be any more expensive, brings actionable expertise, and puts an emphasis on customer service.
[1] Techspot, Most consumers hate the idea of AI-generated customer service, 2024: https://www.techspot.com/news/103748-most-consumers-hate-idea-ai-generated-customer-service.html
[2] Fast Company, Going ‘AI first’ appears to be backfiring on Klarna and Duolingo, 2025: https://www.fastcompany.com/91332763/going-ai-first-appears-to-be-backfiring-on-klarna-and-duolingo
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