Product updates: phone payments, callbacks, rollout tracking and machine apps

Here is what shipped recently. Four changes, starting with the one customers have asked about most.

Take bill payments over the phone

Grace can now take a payment during the call. When the caller is ready to pay, she hands them to the telephony provider’s secure card capture. The caller keys in their card on the keypad, and the provider sends it to your payment processor. Dial AI never receives the card number, expiry or security code.

Payments still go through your existing payment provider, the same way they do today. Nothing changes about who processes the money.

A few details that matter in practice:

• The call recording is paused during card capture, so the card is never on tape. It starts again once the payment is done.
• The conversation continues after the payment. The caller is not disconnected. Grace gets the result (approved or declined, with the confirmation number) and carries on, so she can read back the confirmation, or help the caller if the card was declined.
• You can write the card capture prompts yourself. Depending on your phone provider, they can also be spoken in your agent’s own voice, so the call doesn’t sound like it was handed to a different system.

Call backs instead of hold

When every representative is busy, Grace can offer the caller a call back instead of a wait on hold. The caller hangs up but keeps their place in the queue. When a representative takes them, the system calls them back from your number and connects them. Before offering, Grace can give an estimated wait, based on how many people are ahead and how long calls are taking.

Call backs are offered only when someone is there to make them. Outside your opening hours, or when nobody is signed in to take the call, Grace does not offer one.

After hours, callers can go on a callback list instead. Your team works the list the next morning: take the next callback, make the call, record how it went. Unanswered calls are retried later, and each queue’s members are notified when callbacks are due.

Track your rollout, end to end

The new Deployments tracker follows a customer engagement from kickoff to full AI call coverage. It is the page we run our own rollouts on, and the customer sees the same page.

Each deployment has:

• milestone phases, from planning and requirements through testing, training and the weeks after go-live, each with its own checklist
• a calendar of planned and actual dates, due items and the go-live date, which you can add to your own calendar
• a testing view that shows which test scenarios pass, fail or have not run yet, and so whether the go-live is ready
• blockers, and a log of meetings, decisions and milestones
• status reports in Excel, exported when you need one or made on a schedule (for example every Friday) and kept on the deployment

Everyone involved can see where the go-live stands without waiting for a status call.

Connect your systems with machine apps

Tenant admins can now create machine apps: API credentials for connecting your own systems and integrations to Dial AI.

A machine app does not need a stored secret. It can sign in with a key pair it holds, or with the identity your platform already gives it: a GitHub Actions or GitLab CI token, or a Kubernetes service account. There is no password to leak or rotate.

Each app gets exactly the permissions you give it and nothing else. Some permissions cannot be given to an app at all, such as managing users and roles, or creating other apps, so an app cannot give itself more access than you intended.

Machine apps are available once your organization has signed our API usage agreement. Email support@dialai.ca to get that started.

Want a walkthrough?

Book a demo and we will show you any of these on a real call. If you are at APPA Customer Connections in Nashville, 25–28 October, you can also find us there.