Creditcall Dials Into Omnichannel Payments As Bricks Merge With Clicks

For a retailer, one successful channel strategy is good. Several successful channel strategies are leagues better.

But multiple channel efforts — and ideally, omnichannel ones — are only as good as the information that flows across those channels, allowing retailers to change promotions, tailor marketing, inventory plans and even product placement with speed and efficiency.

Earlier this year, PYMNTS spotlighted the way good merchants become great merchants, with flush top lines. That means working across business lines both tangible and digital, knowing who pays for what, from which types of accounts, when and where.

The numbers bear the lure of conducting this investment and show outsized returns. Consider that social sharing via mobile devices jumped from 18 percent to 34 percent of users across a single year, from the end of 2015 to the end of 2016.  The PYMNTS OmniReadi Index revealed news that, at the same time, product returns jumped from 65 percent to 79 percent.

Holiday shopping also shows torque across bits and bytes, with 71 percent of consumers shopping via the small screen (not the TV; you know, the really small screen that fits in the palm of your hand).

Against that backdrop, with the emergence of omnichannel strategies that must take into consideration sales that occur 24/7/365, Creditcall is announcing today (Aug. 1) that it is making available its ChipDNA link, which is geared toward online payment companies providing omnichannel solutions to merchants, with transaction data traversing in-store and online conduits, gateway to gateway.

In an interview with PYMNTS’ Karen Webster, Jeremy Gumbley, chief technical officer and chief security officer at Creditcall, said that information across payments all too often remains siloed, confined to buckets that correspond to either online or brick-and-mortar businesses.

Thus, crucial information that can give a gestalt view of a retailer’s operations never does get shared.

Creditcall’s white label offering announced Tuesday allows for companies to merge online and brick-and-mortar transactions across a single platform. And a single platform upon which to view all transactions is useful, for example, when online firms — Amazon, anyone? — makes headway into physical locations, or when the converse is true.

Omnichannel efforts need not be hobbled, as information flow is anything but unfettered.

How, then, to foster true integration, necessary when gathering the crucial details that can give merchants insight into who buys what and when, and how to provide a tailored and effective customer experience? As the Internet of Things (IoT) takes shape, such cross-channel insight will become ever more important, as payments speed across one device to another.

Gumbley told PYMNTS that up until now there has been a “dearth of information” provided to merchants and their payments providers when it comes to users’ card credentials. Fine-grained data, such as whether transactions are debit or credit, can give insight into how people feel about paying for different items online and off and how they use their mobile devices. Even demographics — such as regional data — offer ways for merchants to tailor their offerings.

All of this gives a sense of what works and what doesn’t, and information flows in real time and comes through tokenized feeds. Creditcall views itself as the technical base for innovative companies (across retailers and payments) to develop their own apps.

Offering up a hypothetical, Gumbley stated that, using the Creditcall platform, Barnes and Noble can discover that an individual customer may use their account three times as more often online than in store and that a certain credit card is most often used, perhaps hinting that this person feels more secure using this account (with limited liabilities in place) than debit. That information can be useful when tailoring promotional activity (pushing it, for example, to certain rewards programs) and cementing customer loyalty.