Customer loyalty is generally a hard-earned reward. Offering excellence as far as product and support go represents the fundament. When developing, or delivering a financial service, the user experience needs to be front and centre.
If you sell products across multiple channels, offline and online, the consistency of the experience becomes another key factor. The following is a checklist for conversion-friendly omnichannel businesses.
Is your User Experience (UX) up to scratch?
Did you know that you have 50 milliseconds to encourage a visit to your website? (source: study from Human-Oriented Technology Lab, Carleton University). A great website UX gets your customers «in the door».
The quality and price of your product offering inspire them to «receive your hospitality» and the eCommerce payment gateway convinces them to leave happy with a completed mission (of a purchase). A mobile-first, uncluttered design with personalised features should be the standard.
UX and Payments
When you present your customer with a payment solution, there are a complex set of processes put in motion to complete the purchase, and you don’t want this to impact either the patience or the trust of your customer. A simple and transparent process is at the heart of the successful solution. The following factors make up a user-friendly payment experience.
Mobile friendly
The payment gateway must allow for a cross-device shopping journey. Today’s consumers switch between devices when searching for and shopping for goods. 40% of online transactions include multiple devices, and 80% of people jump between devices every day (source: Go-Globe).
Ideally, the payment gateway should be your only «point of entry» for both offline and online businesses. Besides the unified commerce experience you can offer your customer, real-time transaction data is available in a dashboard that can function as the «virtual cockpit» for your business strategy.
Offer Alternative Payment Methods
Defining Alternative payments in keeping with the spirit of keeping it simple, they are non-card-based payment methods. The powerful tool to increase conversion rates. APMs are forecast to account for over 53% of eCommerce transactions by 2025, according to Statista. Besides convenience, the fear of scams is another driver of this development.
Alternative payments are really not «alternative» anymore and merchants need to choose among the approx. 200 methods to tailor-made an offering for their specific customer profile. Some of the more efficient APM include pay by link, QR code payments, Alipay +, WeChat Pay and Apple Pay.
Multi Acquiring with Smart routing
An acquirer is the intermediary between the card and the banks and effectuates the transaction. For various reasons (like traffic overload), the acquirer may be down and cause a failed transaction. An optimal payment gateway, therefore, has a multi-acquiring network that, through Smart Routing, identifies the acquirer with the ideal availability/compatibility for each transaction. This reduces the rate of failed or rejected transactions, increasing your e-commerce conversion.
Tokenisation
Trust and Tokenisation go together as the latter facilitates the highest transaction security in eCommerce. Tokenisation technology generates a number that is associated with each customer on their first purchase.
Unlike encryption, payment details are stored the first time the customer enters them so that there is no need to re-enter them with each purchase, protecting them from possible decryption. This allows you to offer maximum security payments to your customers.
Checkout Optimisation
Make sure you don’t lose a sale by turning your customer away at the checkout. When you meet your customer face-to-face in the store you greet her with a smile and a pos-terminal loaded with the traditional and the alternative payment methods. Online, «the smile» is represented by a trustworthy, obstacle-free checkout process. And, of course, a range of traditional and alternative payment methods!
Having in place a seamless check-out solution in Iframe is an embedded payment solution that eliminates the need for an external payment page. This eliminates an extra step in the checkout process while further building trust as the checkout is seamlessly integrated into the website.
Build Trust With Data Privacy Transparency and Secure Payments
In the process of purchasing a product, private data is shared through a device or an online link. Furthermore, when establishing a long-term relationship with a customer, even more data are shared. Having user-friendly and transparent data privacy is an asset for your company.
This would reassure your customer about the seriousness and customer focus of your business. A report from EY concludes that data protection is the primary trust builder across all user groups.
The other side of the coin is offering secure payments. This means having in place robust encryption algorithms and authentication protocols to safeguard user data from unauthorized access, fraud, and cyber threats.
With end-to-end encryption, interception and tampering of sensitive information is prevented. Moreover, additional security measures such as tokenisation, two-factor authentication, and biometric verification enhance the integrity of payment transactions.
Loyalty Programs and Apps
Consumers today expect a personalised shopping experience, in any channel. Besides personalising offers, having a reward/loyalty program tailor-made to your customer is a great relationship builder.
Presenting loyalty initiatives directly in the payment app or POS terminal is a seamless method for having your customers opt-in to a loyalty program. Introducing this at the point of sale, whether online check-out or in the payment terminal will substantially boost the recruitment.
This is just touching upon a few of the possibilities that financial technology can offer offline and online businesses. The fascinating reality is that what might historically be seen as a purely «mechanical operation», the payment, can today be used to inspire more sales, build trust and loyalty and level up your entire business.
