Looking at innovations in payments to increase your bottom line
Not enough companies are focused on making the initial transaction a key part of the customer experience.
There was a recent Techcrunch story about CVS, becoming the first national retailer to offer support for PayPal and Venmo QR codes at checkout. One ideal I currently hold closely is that we haven’t even scratched the surface with payments. It could be so much better…especially at the point of sale.
I won't go into any of the technical complexities that occur when you're trying to do payments at scale, because frankly, I’m not an engineer. However, I do frequently study consumer psychology and trends - this and my background in helping companies launch is what experiences I’m pulling from.
With POS systems, it’s been interesting to see how they evolve. Even more interesting to see how QR codes are having a revived time in the sun after being ridiculed just 5-7 years ago as a stupid party trick. Now we are looking at how payments and FinTech, in general, are advancing, and we are seeing it is largely dictated by the regulatory bodies.
Everyone knows that cards should’ve been tap to pay, it has been a standard overseas for years, yet the U.S. mostly adopted it in the past 16-18 months (exacerbated by the pandemic). The farther we lag behind the world, the more other companies will gain a head start on our innovation pipeline. You don’t have to look any further than SuperApps in Asia or the personal identity apps in Estonia. We are struggling to keep up and it will have some effects moving forward as the world continues on its rapid pace of globalization.
A few years ago when we were traveling to Australia, we actually stopped carrying our wallets around. It was pointless. Even street vendors took ApplePay. That was in 2018 and to this day I cannot pay for my groceries at Kroger with anything other than their in-house KrogerPay.
There are a lot of aspects of payments that have been discovered. However, I'm convinced that the easier you can make payments for your customers, the better.
There are so many times where I'm going to order from a restaurant and I stop short because of all the information they are asking me for. I don’t want to sign-up for an account. I just want to play order. Having to enter card information makes it difficult for me to do that and if my card isn’t saved to my mobile browser - this becomes a UX nightmare (especially if the site isn’t optimized for mobile).
They lose the sale.
On the flip side, I’ve seen some restaurants adapt. At Bar Taco, you pay as you order. At Hawker Hall, they give you a receipt with a QR code where you can use ApplePay to quickly pay as you’re walking away. Both are relatively seamless when you take into account that many retailers are still asking for too much information (without any context).
Want my email to send me deals? Say that. You don’t need me to have a user account for that. You also don’t need my address or phone number. Every single field you add to your payments flow reduces your chances of turning a lead to a customer. Make it as easy and simple as you possibly can - then once you get the sale, ask for information to fill out their “profile."
As you increase your experience you not only save on customer churn, you also are able to earn more revenue per employee hired. Because when you increase certain aspects of CX, you can decrease the costs associated with covering for a poor experience. If Comcast had an incredible product, they would have less customer service calls, and therefore need fewer customer services reps.
The reason why certain companies have bloated teams, especially on the customer experience or customer success side is that their product isn’t where it could be. They need team members to help continuously explain the value of their product to their customers - which could reveal a potential long-term issue over product road mapping and leveraging user interviews.
Some Customer Success teams are built specifically to help surface features that would be lovable in the eyes of the customers. I’m not talking about those (which in essence drives retention up and reduces customer churn). If you have to continuously beg customers to use certain features, that they may not be familiar with, it may mean that the product design needs another once-over to confirm that the workflow of each feature makes sense.
As new ways of payments, start to bubble up, take a look at them. See if it would enhance the experience of your customers. Because, as you're running your companies you will need to incorporate some unique form of payments that will ease the process of transitioning from a lead to a paying customer. Or someone else will.