Streamline Customer Service with AI – Right on the Invoice

According to a survey of over 200 CFOs, efficiency gains and cost savings are at the top of finance departments' priority lists. And they see great opportunities to streamline operations with the help of AI and new technology, primarily by:

• Automating repetitive tasks

• Improving analyses and forecasts

• Reducing the time spent on customer service inquiries

Download and read the CFO Report if you want to deep dive into benchmarks, insights, and analyses from the survey.

Chatbot for Invoice Questions = A Low-Hanging AI Fruit

Recently, AI tools have transitioned from hopes and potential to concrete functionality. According to AI expert Errol Koolmeister, you should prioritize your AI investments based on three variables: value, feasibility, and reusability. You'll achieve the fastest impact by improving your existing processes.

One way to achieve significant efficiency with relatively little effort is to let an AI-powered chatbot answer common invoice questions from your customers. And, when the conditions are right, even resolve simpler issues. In other words, the CFOs in the aforementioned survey are on the right track when they view time savings in customer service as a potential AI optimization.

With Agentic Assist, AI Helps Your Customers Directly on the Invoice

Carl Oscar Aaro, Generative AI Engineer at Billogram, shares the CFOs' perspective. He's involved in developing the Agentic Assist feature: an AI chatbot that can answer questions directly within Billogram's digital and interactive invoicing interface.

"We've long offered the ability for customers to ask customer service questions on the invoice. What's new is that your company can now choose to staff the chat with an AI bot as a complement to your human support agents," Carl Oscar explains.

He believes that chatbots have had a poor reputation for a long time, but that the leaps in generative AI and language model development in recent years have completely changed the situation:

"AI has become incredibly much better at interpreting our intent, even when we express ourselves unclearly. In a short time, we've gotten used to this new level. This impacts the expectations we, as consumers, have for companies' ability to quickly provide us with high-quality answers, without having to wait for an agent to have time for us."

A Boost for Efficiency – And the Customer Experience

Carl Oscar sees letting the AI chatbot go from answering invoice questions to also performing simpler actions as a natural next step. But he understands companies that hesitate:

"It requires solid foundational work to set up clear rules for how the AI should and should not behave, so that it follows your company's policies. For example, it shouldn't be persuaded to delete an invoice that the customer actually needs to pay."

But, he emphasizes, this foundational work provides valuable rewards – both in terms of internal efficiency and the customer experience:

"Questions related to invoicing and payments often make up a large portion of a company's support cases. By letting AI resolve simpler tasks, you can reduce handling time to near zero for many common issues, while your agents can focus on more complex inquiries."

What Tasks Can You Entrust to an AI Chatbot for Invoice Questions?

Below, we list examples of what an AI chatbot for invoice questions can handle today, as well as the possibilities Carl Oscar and his team see in the longer term.

What the AI Chatbot Can Handle Today

Companies that have activated the Agentic Assist AI feature in Billogram's platform can already let the chatbot help with the following tasks, directly in the interactive invoicing interface:

• Provide answers to questions about a current invoice (amount, due date, OCR number, etc.)

• Explain which payment methods are available and how the customer can switch (e.g., direct debit, Swish, card payment, or bank transfer)

• Answer questions in the same language the customer asks them in

• Provide answers regarding invoice history (e.g., explain why the current invoice has a higher amount than the previous month's)

• Refer the customer to support if needed (including a brief summary of the issue and what the customer should keep in mind in their continued dialogue with support)

Upcoming Functionality

Agentic Assist is continuously evolving. And as MCP servers* begin to be used more widely, the potential application areas also grow. In the near future, it will be possible to connect the functions below, adapted to each company's own rules and policies:

• Set up a payment extension for a customer requesting more time to pay

• Automatically write off a reminder fee if the customer has recently paid

• Create a support ticket for the customer in cases requiring a human decision

• Suggest activating "soft" reminders (so that the customer will receive a notification via SMS or email on the due date in the future to minimize the risk of missing an invoice)

• Suggest switching to more efficient payment methods (e.g., advise the customer to activate direct debit)

• Ask the customer for valuable feedback directly within the conversation

Potential Functions for Future Development

Carl Oscar looks forward to continuing to develop AI functionality for more efficient support and smoother customer experiences in the future, in close collaboration with colleagues and client companies alike. Above all, he sees great potential in setting up more smart integrations via both MCP servers and classic APIs. This enables Agentic Assist to combine data from multiple sources to resolve – and ultimately prevent – customer invoice questions. Here are some examples of what this could entail:

• Retrieve relevant data from CRM, booking systems, and other third-party services (e.g., to adjust the amount or cancel an invoice if a service has been canceled)

• Implement changes to distribution channels, payment methods, or subscription types (based on customer requests)

• Provide tailored suggestions for services and plans (based on customer history and usage patterns)

• Input collected feedback directly into the CRM (to streamline customer insight work)

• Share information and collaborate with other AI tools the company uses to take the automation of payment flows and other financial processes to a whole new level.

*What is MCP (Model Context Protocol)?

An MCP server can be described as an API for AI agents. MCP development is driven as an open initiative, where several major players in the AI field contribute to creating common standards for AI collaboration.

As companies use an increasing number of different AI tools, the need for these to interact effectively also grows. Via MCP servers, different AI agents or bots can share data and instructions with each other, thereby gaining access to a larger context for the task they are to perform.

Ultimately, this development enables the automation of more steps in various processes that previously required manual handling. More concretely, this could mean, for example, that:

• One AI agent analyzing customer data can ask another AI agent to create personalized email blasts for certain customer groups.

• A third agent can take over and schedule the email blasts in a CRM system.

Discover What Billogram Can Do For You

Want to know more about the Agentic Assist AI feature – or about all the other ways Billogram can simplify your company's invoicing and payment management? Don't hesitate to get in touch, and we'll schedule a no-obligation meeting.