“Effective AI needs solid data.”
You’ve probably heard this a thousand times by now. Even Salesforce founder Marc Benioff expressed as much on X:
“AI’s true gold isn’t in the UI or model—they’re both commodities. What breathes life into AI is the data & metadata that describes the data to the model—just like oxygen for us. The future’s fortune lies in our data. Yes, Data is the new gold! 💖”
The potential of payment data
When we look at data, we see that order information, contact details, and case information is often synced across the application landscape and therefore made available for AI agents. At the same time, payment data often stays distributed and siloed in back-end systems. Invisible for everyone except the Finance team.
Why does only the Finance team have access to this kind of valuable data? In many cases, payments are the most regular interaction with the customer, and a source of customer engagement and communications. Let’s zoom in on a specific example of a failed payment. When a payment fails to process, sending a message starting with a generic “Dear customer” adds insult to injury; not adding anything to enhance the customer relationship. But when this same message is truly personalized, referencing previous engagements, customer preferred payment methods and channels, and shows understanding of the relationship, it will be conceived differently, motivating the customer to pay and ultimately drive customer loyalty. This is only possible if the payments data is unified with the rest of the customer profile.
Two sides of a coin
Where does your organization focus most of its attention regarding payments? Customer experience? Or internal efficiency?
The balance between customer payment experiences and internal payment operations is often skewed in one direction or the other. Payment operations, like processing, reconciliation, and settlement, exist in isolation from customer-facing activities such as support, renewals, or self-service. If you prioritize a sleek customer experience, is your finance team struggling to keep up with the administrative load? Or do you focus on operations, but leave customers with limited choices in payment methods and overall disjointed payment journeys?
If either is true, you will have noticed this results in friction for both the customer and the team.
FinDock takes a different approach, extending Salesforce with a powerful native payments engine which unites operations and experiences.
Giving your teams a real-time, unified view of every transaction and the person behind it. Leading to faster processing, smarter automation, better service, and a happier payment experience for everyone involved.
Empowering Agents
One area where this approach to Payments on Salesforce is essential, is in AI agents powered by Agentforce. Enjoying the same unified view; Agentforce’s AI agents have access to both transaction and customer data in one platform. Enabling them to be employed on both the operational and the customer facing side with great effectiveness.
What we have found is that the best use cases for AI agents, in this context, are not the complex, high-profile activities. Rather, the best and most efficient agents focus on the routine, repetitive tasks that come with payment capture, processing, and reconciliation. With that in mind, let’s dive into a couple of concrete examples of how Agentforce combined with payment data can truly empower staff to be more efficient and customers to be self-sufficient.
1. Bank payment matching with Agentforce
One common recurring task is the daily bank statement matching process. Through Guided Matching, FinDock already helps organizations process bank payments incredibly efficiently, however, rule-based systems like this have limits. Sometimes you need to truly understand what the customer wrote in order to correctly match and reconcile the transaction. This is where LLM driven agents like Agentforce stand out. Their ability to read text and actually understand the message gives them the ability to match transactions like a human would. Ultimately leading to near 100% automated matching, where the role of the financial controller shifts from execution, to verifying the results. Imagine all your payment confirmations, failed payment follow-up messages, and fulfillment initiations sent out, before the work day even starts!
2. Conversational conversion
How many times have you agreed to something just because you were having a nice conversation? Conversations can be a powerful tool for conversion, but until recently, this was limited to human contact and as such, not very scalable.
But with Agentforce, the agent can engage in conversations with every single customer, 24 hours a day, 7 days a week.
Via chat, email, and soon even phone conversations; agents can guide customers and donors through the process of placing an order or making a donation just like a service representative would. Having the ability to list available payment methods; understand the preferences of the person it’s talking to; and ultimately initiate new payment transactions.
3. Self-service payment plans
Using AI agents has a number of advantages, not just for you as an organization, but also for customers looking to interact with you. In some cases, talking to an AI Agent can actually be easier. For example, if a customer has an invoice, they cannot afford to pay in full. Discussing financial distress can be uncomfortable; some customers may prefer speaking with an AI agent, which feels less judgmental and lowers emotional barriers. And just like with setting up new orders or donations, Agentforce can easily set up payment plans on existing invoices. With FinDock, it can understand the related customer payments data, so it can even suggest using existing payment authorizations, such as a direct debit mandate or credit card authorization to pay the new payment plan. Leading to quick and easy setup for the customer and increased customer payment happiness.
What’s next?
If you have followed the development and power of these AI agents over the last months, you will have seen their capabilities increase at an incredible rate. And this is likely to continue for the foreseeable future. This means agents are only going to get more powerful and useful.
For your service reps and finance teams, this means more of the monotonous and boring work can be offloaded to agents, even the work which requires in-depth understanding of the customer’s situation and context. Allowing them to focus on the tasks they find enjoyable and excel at, increasing employee productivity and satisfaction.
On the customer experience side of the coin, your customers get more capabilities through self-service. Being able to have a (phone) conversation with your customer service at a moment they prefer, even if that is at 3 AM.
The rapid advancement in Agentic AI; evolving from reactive assistants to autonomous collaborators; enables these agents to take on increasingly complex tasks across your organization. With FinDock and Salesforce, you can be sure your technology- and data foundations are ready for these future agentic coworkers to thrive.