19th March, 2018
The payment landscape is increasingly digital and changing rapidly, and it can be hard to keep up, but it’s vital that you do: or your competitors will.
New payment technology is creating opportunities for savvy businesses to engage with their customers in a whole new way.
Digital wallets, payment apps, chatbots, and Interactive Voice Response (IVR) phone payments will have an impact on how businesses engage with their customers and their preferred payment methods.
Digital wallets such as Google Wallet are on the rise, storing everything from virtual credit cards to store loyalty cards.
A study from MasterCard found that digital wallets were mentioned in 75 percent of tracked conversations that social media users had about new ways to pay.
Other significant findings of the study are that social media users often talked about how they’d like to both store loyalty cards on their wallet and use their phone to pay for transit system fares.
This supports an Urban Airship study from 2016, which found that 67 percent of consumers want loyalty functionality in mobile wallets, making it the most popular feature.
Payment apps, including multipurpose apps like ApplePay, Venmo and PayPal, and card-specific apps like Chase Pay makes the entire payment process much easier and convenient for shoppers.
Shoppers generally complained about entering, forgetting and resetting their passwords and expressed an interest of getting rid of passwords altogether.
This has led to new developments in facial recognition, fingerprint and touch authentication.
Chatbots, are human interaction on a different level.
For too long, consumers have had to bear the “Your call is very important to us, please continue to hold” dullness.
This is the year where this unintelligent automation disappears.
Thanks to advances in artificial intelligence, the majority of customer queries can now be answered quickly and efficiently via a chatbot, with human help only required for the really tricky questions.
As consumers become more digitally savvy and open their minds to a smarter technological future, so too does their confidence in these intelligent robots such as chatbots.
As consumers’ relationship with money evolves and their trust in chatbots evolves, we’ll see them wanting more interaction with technology.
IVR phone payments enable you to collect payments from your customers by calling you without having to speak with anyone.
They enter their credit card details and the payment will be processed instantly.
You may have run into this type of payment option when paying your household bills over the phone with larger companies.
But IVR is now within the grasp of smaller businesses, making it a viable option to explore.
For the most part, customers are the ones driving change. They’re embracing emerging technology and establishing new expectations for service delivery.
While many businesses have taken on being ‘customer centric’ with mobile payments, social selling, and online channels, they’ll need to once again up their game with the new wave of emerging technology.
There’s no doubt the customer is in the driver’s seat when it comes to deciding what the level of payment service expectation should be when they transact with your business.
Make sure whatever you do is customer centric and has a strong security and privacy component.
If those aren’t considered, then you risk losing the trust and the business of your customers.
Payment aggregators such as MYOB PayBy, seamlessly facilitate payment transactions on behalf of businesses, who supply goods and services.
These businesses are onboarded to an MYOB PayBy account and never need to worry about being PCI compliant or dealing with multiple banks and payment providers.
For payers, it means that they can now pay using more methods than ever before.
How consumers are driving payment changes
What the payments industry will look like in 2020
The New Payment Platform is here. What is it?