Improving The Customer Experience With Connected Payments

“Exceptional service requires businesses to deliver intelligent interactions where customers can pay or get paid in their preferred method, at any time, from any location, using any device, seamlessly,” says Greg Bloh, CEO of Transcard. “Creating this hyperconnected, data-driven environment requires businesses to rethink the way they make and receive customer payments.” Read more in his excerpt from The Connected Economy’s Power Source – CEO Edition.

Customers expect more when it comes to paying and getting paid by businesses. And they are increasingly willing to take their business elsewhere if they don’t get the experience they want. In our always-on economy, customers can use a mobile device to instantly download the latest bestseller or chart-topping song, have dinner delivered to their front door or arrange for a car to pick them up — all with a few clicks. Why can’t all payment interactions work like this?

To win over customers, businesses must close the gap between customer expectations and the payments experience. But this means more than offering digital payment options. Customers have had their fill of disjointed payments environments where they can never be sure how things work or where things stand with their payments. And customers have too many other operations for buying goods and services to submit to a lousy payments process.

Exceptional service requires businesses to deliver intelligent interactions where customers can pay or get paid in their preferred method, at any time, from any location, using any device, seamlessly. Creating this hyperconnected, data-driven environment requires businesses to rethink the way they make and receive customer payments.

A service-driven payments environment begins with several important components:

• Multi-rail payments, including faster payments to better serve customers. • Self-service mobile tools so customers can pay whenever they want, wherever they are.
• Simple approaches to checking balances and payment status, receiving payments, paying outstanding balances, scheduling recurring payments and making multiple payments.
• Embedded workflows that create a frictionless and personalized buyer-seller relationship.
• Attachments that provide consumers with a clear explanation of a payment.
• ERP integration for the centralized and current data required in today’s on-demand world.
• Bank-grade security that offers convenient payments without sacrificing security.

Modern payments solutions combine these capabilities in a single, flexible and scalable platform.

Better Payments, Better Customer Service

Service-minded businesses are already leveraging payments to strengthen customer relationships. From healthcare organizations and insurers to property management companies and airlines, more businesses are embracing change and giving consumers the option to receive eChecks or have payments deposited to a digital wallet (such as those from Apple or Google), a digital or physical card, or directly to a bank account through direct deposit. Imagine the customer service impact of instantly providing needed funds to a policyholder who has been impacted by a natural disaster.

What’s more, modern payment solutions enable businesses to deliver a seamless experience, whether they are making a single customer payment or generating a large volume of payments to customers.

Taking a service-minded approach to payments can have a big impact on the corporate bottom line by enabling:

• Increased sales
• Greater share of customer wallets
• Improved customer retention
• Increased market share
• Higher profitability
• Businesses face extraordinary pressure and competition for customers

Automating consumer payments with a solution that combines the features listed above enables businesses to provide a deeper, more personalized experience that customers crave. Now, that’s good business.