How consolidation improves customer experiences, payment alternatives, and expenses for retailers
Today, there are just too many payment providers for many shops.
Retailers have amassed a growing list of payment providers for each line of business, each regional market where they wish to transact, or to acquire a specific capability not provided by their current vendors, whether it is for supporting transactions across individual sales channels, expanding into new geographic markets, or acquiring a new payment method capability.
In addition to less flexibility across the whole organization to provide improved customer and checkout experiences, the consequence is a tangle of payment system suppliers that can only handle the demands of a single channel, use case, or area. There are several operational and customer service issues with this fragmented approach to payment processing, including:
Technical debt is exacerbated by the proliferation of payment providers. As new payment methods are added or compliance requirements change, the integrations required for each provider must be continuously maintained.
Executives find it challenging to obtain a unified picture of sales and performance throughout the company due to the fact that different vendors give payment analytics and reports in different forms. Additionally, this presents significant challenges for customer support agents who must determine which processor was utilized to handle inbound questions or refund requests.
Lastly, managing several vendor contracts causes management issues. It takes up valuable time and resources from internal teams that are in charge of evaluating and assessing vendor quality. Because volume is distributed among several vendors, there’s also a strong risk the merchant won’t receive the greatest deal from the vendor.
Retailers must un-silo and combine the number of payment providers they use in order to address and overcome these obstacles. By doing this, operational expenses and technological complexity will be decreased, and customer experiences will be improved in the following ways:
Establishing consistency and continuity
Retailers must offer payment experiences that let customers pay with the currency and payment method of their choice while maintaining a consistent experience across all channels in order to boost sales and solve checkout abandonment problems. To make this work, they frequently improvise solutions. Retailers may let consumers buy products and services using their chosen method by combining payment providers, guaranteeing a consistent experience across all channels, use cases, and geographical locations.
Furthermore, it is possible to more effectively implement new payment methods throughout the company, guaranteeing that all clients will profit regardless of the method they use. Last but not least, retailers may now more readily gather and use insightful data analytics that can guide deep and meaningful consumer interactions, expand the addressable market, and boost sales and brand loyalty.
Making use of global payments coordination
Retailers of all sizes can expand into new markets, implement new payment methods, dynamically route payments to avoid international processing fees, and generally see improvements in their bottom line by partnering with a provider that offers cutting-edge global payment orchestration capabilities.
In addition to having a strong redundancy and failover capacity to protect against outages, unforeseen changes in acquiring bank business acceptance standards, or issuing bank rejects, payment orchestration allows merchants to maximize revenue by decreasing unsuccessful transactions. Retailers may also leverage payment features for a variety of unique business use cases, such as marketplaces, invoicing, and subscriptions.
An improved consumer experience
An integrated payments environment has several advantages for customer service agents and the whole support department. Agents can quickly and easily access client payment information using a single system, which cuts down on the amount of time spent on each question and eventually improves the call center’s overall efficiency. New agents can be trained and onboarded more quickly, and the negative effects of turnover are reduced because they will only need to become familiar with one system.
To be sure, there are difficulties in the process of consolidation. Converging systems and data migrations are inherently risky. Reworking the algorithms that control the flow of money between various suppliers will be necessary. As the convergence process progresses, the likelihood of payment systems experiencing outages grows. Attempting such an endeavor at the busiest periods of the season would not be wise.
Ultimately, though, these difficulties are undoubtedly doable, and the advantages will much exceed the hazards. Adopting a comprehensive strategy for payments and cutting back on payment providers would allow any shop to operate anywhere they choose with less complexity and expense as payment technology and customer preferences change.