How to Improve Your Customer Payment Experience and Why It Matters
The modern customer values convenience, security, and personalization. For every service, they hold a higher standard than ever before. They want intelligent and intuitive solutions that make their lives easier and digital security that keeps their data safe without compromising convenience.
Your customer’s payment experience should be no different.
It’s imperative that you provide a payment solution for your customers that is convenient, capable, and compliant — backed by the most advanced technology to not only meet their expectations but to exceed them and create loyal long-lasting customers.
What is included in the customer payment experience?
Your customer’s experience is defined by every engagement with your business or organization. Each “touch-point” is an opportunity to interact with your customer and create a memorable experience that can lead them to share your organization with others, create a long-lasting brand champion who advocates on behalf of your brand or encourage them to expand their relationship with your brand or to use more of your services.
To craft a valuable experience for your customers, you need to know what is important to them and where to place your focus.
The customer payment experience goes beyond the single transaction of them paying you. It includes how they get there, what the transaction process feels like for them, and their attitude about returning to do that process again.
When analyzing each of these meeting points with your customer, look for opportunities to improve your customer experience:
- Do your customers feel prepared for the payment experience? Do they begin the process with all the information they need to move through the process with ease? Are there any areas that are confusing? Do any customers feel overwhelmed or unprepared going through the payment process?
- How do your customers pay? Are the options available to them convenient? Do your options meet all the needs of your diverse customer base? Are any of your customers feeling isolated or finding frustration from limitations in your current offering?
- What does the process of making a payment feel like for your customer? Is your payment solution intuitive or unnecessarily complex? Can making payments be made easy, even enjoyable? Does the process leave them feeling empowered to control their own experience, or do they feel like they’re using a prescribed solution that doesn’t fit their needs?
- How does your customer feel about returning to make another payment? Does your customer dread the payment experience, or do they wish that more organizations offered solutions like yours?
These individual points of connection with your customers are valuable opportunities to establish their relationship with your organization’s brand.
If your customer finds the payment process to be cumbersome, outdated, or impersonal, your brand also feels more cumbersome, outdated, and impersonal. Contrary, if your customer finds their experience with your brand to be simple, intuitive, and reliable, they’ll view your organization in a similarly positive light.
These differences in a customer’s experience can make the difference between a loyal customer who recommends your organization to others or an unsatisfied customer who is actively looking for a better solution that fits their needs.
How to Improve Your Customer Payment Experience
Improving your customers’ experiences is about showing your customers that you care about what they care about. In the payment process, you can improve their experience by incorporating these three key factors:
1. Robust Payment Options
When you have a robust offering of payment options for your customers, it allows them to have choice and independence in deciding when and where to meet your brand. If you limit their options in ways that don’t meet the needs of all your customers, you also limit their loyalty to your organization.
Provide multiple payment solutions to meet the variety of needs within your customer base.
Your customers are just as unique as your business. Your solutions should reflect the diversity that exists within your customer base and consider markets and audiences who are looking for solutions like yours.
Expand your payment options to include:
- Electronic Payments – eCheck, credit card, online access
- Mobile Payment Solutions – providing convenience, flexibility, and accessibility through their mobile devices
- Telephone Payments – offering convenience, security, and choice
- In-Person Payments – building value and trust through human interaction
Remember that expanding your payment options is preferred over replacing payment options. Don’t pursue modern solutions and new technologies at the cost of your customer experience. Removing certain technologies from your service offering can isolate existing customers and leave them feeling unappreciated. Instead of removing these completely, you can find solutions that incorporate all these payment solutions with a single vendor service like FirsTech.
Provide multiple payment solutions to meet the variety of needs within your customer base.
2. Modern Solutions
Modernization of your customer payment experience occurs on two ends of your payment solution: the frontend user experience (UX) and the backend technology and security solutions. Both are crucial elements of the overall payment experience.
Having a modern interface to interact with your customers is essential. No matter how great your service or technology is if your packaging is unattractive or outdated, customers don’t want to use it.
View your UX as the place you get to meet with each customer individually. How can you insert your brand voice? How can you show your customers what you value? You need to interface with your customer on a modern platform that is comparable to the other services they interact with daily. Show your customers that your organization is modern, relevant, and here for the long term.
In the backend of your modern payment solutions, you want to keep your organization current and relevant by staying up to date with the latest technology and security. Protect your customers’ data and privacy as they’d protect it themselves and show them that it matters to you as an organization.
Instead of reacting, be proactive in your security measures and fraud prevention by imploring the efficient use of AI and Machine Learning. This gives your customers confidence and security in your organization and shows them that you’re committed to providing modern solutions that fit their needs.
3. Personalization
Finally, improve the payment experience by providing personalized solutions.
Pay attention to the details of each meeting point and make the customer experience enjoyable – not just transactional. You can do this by using artificial intelligence and machine learning to customize each customer’s interaction with the payment process. This makes it more efficient and easier to use your platform and gives you the opportunity to proactively interact with your customers in a helpful and relevant way. Send a notification to suggest making a mobile payment, analyze curious spending behavior, or incorporate biometric technology to add a layer of security without sacrificing convenience.
These personalized interactions will look different between organizations. Understand the unique pain points, concerns, and values of your customers, and design solutions that are personalized to meet those needs.
Why the Customer Payment Experience Matters
In a world with endless options and growing competition, the biggest differentiating factor is your customer experience. Anyone can provide a service or a product, but yours stands out by the experience that you provide to your customers. That’s something they can’t get anywhere else.
It’s likely that your customers choose you over your competitors for the experience you provide through your products or services and the history they have with your brand. By extending that experience to the payment stage, you can continue to provide one singular and cohesive service that extends beyond functionality.
In addition to differentiating your organization from others, a positive customer payment experience cultivates customer loyalty.
Satisfied customers are loyal customers. When you can take care of your customers’ needs, provide quality service, offer modern and personalized solutions, and keep their information private and safe, you are cultivating a rich and deep-rooted relationship that they will value and remember.
This kind of loyalty carries you through fluctuating markets and fast-moving trends. It allows you to consistently grow, even when your competition may be stagnating. That’s because word-of-mouth marketing still holds the most value to consumers, and it naturally comes from loyal and satisfied customers who want to share their experiences with others.
Provide solutions that make your customer payment experience worth sharing.
How FirsTech can help you create a powerful customer payment experience
FirsTech has been a leader in this industry for decades and can help you achieve these objectives by providing payment solutions that improve the customer payment experience. These include:
- Payment Solution Services: single and package solutions for organizations of all sizes
- Saas (Software as a Service): branded payment solutions and financial services to offer directly to your customers
- Custom Solutions: let FirsTech help you create a completely custom solution for your organization that fulfills the needs of your organization and provides a superior customer payment experience
To learn more about how FirsTech can help improve your customer payment experience, contact us to speak to a payment solutions specialist today.