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The window most businesses miss for payment follow-ups
The cart died at 4:47pm on a Tuesday. Your buyer spent 11 minutes choosing and finally got to the UPI screen. The OTP could have been delayed, or maybe the doorbell rang, but decided intent worth Rs2000 sits still in their cart.
Here’s the uncomfortable truth: customer intent wears off by the hour. If you call them within 10 minutes, they’re likely to make a purchase. It’s too late the next morning. Your buyer probably talked themselves out of it, or purchased the product elsewhere. Most businesses meet dropped carts as a statistic on their dashboard. After they’ve bid them goodbye.
No one from your team calls the buyer because they’re busy chasing other payments. Cashfree’s data finds that 7 out of 10 SMBs handle payment operations manually. Businesses spend up to 60 hours a week on it.
Today, your team chases 400 dropped carts, recovers failed payments & subscription renewals and meet dispute deadlines all while doing the job you actually hired them for. They’re doing the best they can. They’re trying to make it work, by compensating overtime or pulling all-nighters.
Even then, there will always be that one payment (and in some cases a 100) that nobody got to despite their best effort. Payment follow-ups need to happen automatically everyday. It’s time to pass the baton to Relay.
What is Relay
Relay is your AI teammate that runs payment operations for your business. Her AI Agents read your transaction records and get to work, calling abandoned cart buyers before the intent dies, giving every failed payment a second try, confirming COD orders before dispatch, renewing failed subscriptions, screening refund claims and filing disputes ahead of time.
Not just the task, Relay owns the outcomes. She tracks whether your buyer actually came back for the cart, and decides when would be the best time to call them if they didn’t. You can set up by describing the outcome in plain language. You will never need to open a workflow canvas or a node editor. We built Relay to make your life easier.
She asks you for approval in 2 instances: before a payment moves and before contacting your customer. Everything else, she handles quietly and documents. One thing businesses mistake Relay for is an agent catalog. Every one of Relay’s AI agents is a first party, running on the same engine, same ledger and same gate.
How Relay works
Relay is an AI Superagent. Unlike generic AI agents, she’s got an army of specialists to assist businesses. Let’s take a look at how the Cart Recovery Agent works. All of Relay’s agents work the same way.
Relay doesn’t just detect the dropped cart. An initiated payment that isn’t completed in the stipulated time frame gets a look up, not just an inference. The cart recovery agent checks cart item, order & pincode history and past payment attempts before calling your buyer.
The reach out happens in stages. First, an OTP failure gets a fresh payment link with the failure reason. A buyer that drops off gets a call they most likely will answer. At the same time, the payment link drops directly to their whatsapp mid conversation.
At the end of the day, you get to see the rescue list with all the buyers, messages and calls logged. You get to see the outcomes: recovered, buyer not interested, or simply no response.
One agent learns, all agents know
Relay’s AI agents work off the same memory. This capability is what makes us stand out as it closes the loop most AI products leave open. Most products treat approval as friction. Relay treats it as a training signal. Every correction you make to information collected by the agent before approval works as training data.
If you want to reach out to the buyer with the discounted offer instead of delivery details, then that’s what the agent will learn and prioritise. The agent’s actions follow your terms. Agent memory also remains scoped to each business. Relay’s agents won’t mistake your rules and preferences with that of another business.
Today, planning each call and reviewing each message before the agent shares it with your buyers is where the challenge lies. “Autonomous” happens to be the term of the year when it comes to agent launches. We’ve already reinforced that you stay in control. Let’s look at what happens behind the scenes.
You set the terms. Quiet hours, attempt caps, opt outs and the do’s and don’ts. Relay’s AI agents draft responses. Only actions within your set limits go through. Anything that crosses the specified threshold waits for your input and approval.
We’ve also built a mechanism to ensure anything that fails or is unusual is immediately escalated to an internal review channel staffed by Cashfree. Every action that the agent carries out leaves a trail. Every decision is recorded as it happens, with no way to delete or edit Relay’s actions.
Meet the rest of Relay’s team
All of Relay’s agents follow the same recording, editing and approval process. Here’s what the rest of the team does.
COD Confirmation Agent calls your buyer before orders are dispatched and flags RTO-prone addresses for you to review. They are twice as likely to accept COD orders if they were confirmed before delivery. Buyers that returned orders in the past are provided offers to switch prepaid to lower the RTO risk.
Payment Recovery Agent retries every failed payment. The agent acts as soon as a failed payment is detected. Your buyer receives a call explaining the reason for payment failure and a fresh link to retry on their chat. The agent analyses the buyer’s payment history and past attempts before suggesting the best payment method.
Dispute Responder Agent does more than just gather evidence. It drafts the response and even contacts your customer for missing proof. Every dispute gets filed ahead of time. We tested this agent the hardest because being wrong can cost you the most.
Subscription Dunning Agent regards a failed mandate as a customer slipping away. They enable retries after identifying failure reasons before the window closes. And just like the payment recovery agent, this agent suggests the best payment method after skimming through the buyer’s payment history and past attempts. Your buyers stay subscribed.
Refunds Shield Agent double checks refund claims before they are processed. Checking each and every claim manually would cost your business more than the refunds. Sure, most claims are honest but ones that repeat order images, addresses or a pattern are routed to you for a review. Relay’s got you covered.
6 agents run on the same context engine. When the COD agent learns that a pincode answers after 6pm, the cart recovery agent also knows when this buyer will respond. Sharing one memory enables the agents to work like any other collaborative team.
Keep your payment data secure
An AI agent is just as good as the records under it. Relay runs on Cashfree’s infrastructure and our merchants have been using Relay for payment operations in Beta since May. She’s grounded in real transaction data, reading orders, refunds, disputes, delivery addresses and payment details before making any move. Relay’s agents arrive fully trained on payment operation patterns so they are fully equipped to handle follow ups.
Data security is a real concern too. Before Relay, a stack of point tools meant your payment data sat scattered across a dozen different vendors, each holding its own copy. Now with Relay, it all stays secure in one place. Business data will not be shared to external AI providers.
The response draft was never the hard part. Most AI tools can give you a solid response to follow up on payments. But they can’t see your business’s order data, create custom payment links to share or call your buyer just in time to recover the payment.
For SMBs to build AI that is worth the price takes a lot of engineering work. Prompt tuning, feedback loops, model and token optimisation are all things you will have to take care of. With Relay, your business can skip right ahead to payment follow ups from day one.
Recover more revenue in less time
Relay brings down the time spent on payment operations from 60 hours a week to 45 minutes. And the hours are only half of it. Every follow up her agents close, recovered cart, retried payment & renewal, dispute answered in time is revenue on top of what you already earn and from the demand you paid to create.
If you are a Cashfree merchant, Relay is already on your dashboard. Describe your job. Appoint your agent and let your team get back to growing the business.
