Payments As A Service Tracker: Payments Get The Spa Treatment

Acquiring new clients is hard, but keeping them can be even more challenging.

Just ask health and wellness businesses. These companies often have a difficult time both winning over new clients and then retaining them. With more than 50 percent client turnover each year, paired with a rash of missed appointments that can cost companies as much as $1,000 per appointment, businesses are eager for a solution that can help bring in loyal, long-term customers, while also offering scheduling, data, marketing and other tools.

PYMNTS recently caught up with Chet Brandenburg, chief product officer at MindBody Online, to discuss how full-service payments can impact the health and wellness industry by attracting new customers and turning them into loyal shoppers and cutting down on missed appointments, and what he sees on the road ahead for his company and the space as a whole.

Here’s a preview:

Companies can employ rewards-style programs, in which customers rack up points by spending at a certain business and can use those points to pay for other classes or products, a program that is popular with many businesses currently.

But, Brandenburg said, wellness centers can also use tools like the one offered by him and his team to make customers even more loyal. MindBody clients can enable their customers to sign up for multi-packs of classes, which include admission to five or 10 individual sessions for one price, as well as recurring monthly or yearly subscription services.

By using these different pricing options, along with traditional rewards programs, Brandenburg said, companies attract more new customers and can help ensure they stay loyal.

“These are very popular with our clients right now,” he said. “With the markets we operate in seeing 50 percent annual churn, retention and acquisition are big concerns, and those are both great ways to solve those problems.”

Around the full-service payments world

With lots of questions still swirling around the implantation of EMV cards even a year after the liability shift took effect, merchants from around the full-service payments space looked to partner with other service providers to strengthen their EMV offerings.

For one, Shift4 and RICS have partnered to debut a new EMV-certified solution, while Stripe announced that it would join Control, Miura Systems and payworks in launching the first EMV-compliant POS for Stripe.

Similarly, Paysafe and Handpoint have also collaborated to offer new EMV-ready solutions globally.

To download the November edition of the Payments as a Service Tracker, click the button below.

About The Tracker

The PYMNTS.com Payments as a Service Tracker, in collaboration with Cayan, is designed to give an overview of the trends and activities of merchant platforms that not only enable payment processing of new and old technologies but also integrate with other features to improve the merchant’s experience, including customer engagement, security, omnichannel retail, analytics, inventory management, software and hardware management and more.