It’s one of the most invisible parts of your business, but one of the most defining parts of the customer experience. While it might be tempting to funnel your limited budget into improving other aspects of the business, a frictionless checkout process is no longer simply a transaction, and is instead an expectation of the customer experience.
It’s not just the ease of transaction, though – here’s how crucial your payment process and solution is to your business.
Reputation
The customer experience is directly affected by your checkout process. As a fundamental part of most customer-facing businesses, an outdated payment system sends a message to your customers that their comfort is not at the forefront of your mind, even if other areas of your business have been well developed.
Ideally, transactions should feel as invisible as possible, with zero frustration and minimal stress imposed on the customer. With a good payment process, transactions feel hassle-free and seamless, no matter what bank and card your customer is making payment by. Being able to accommodate your customers’ needs sends a sign that you have already anticipated what they look for in a transaction – and have provided for it.
With a good payment system in place, you will be able to accept various modes of payment – not only the traditional cash and credit cards, but also NFC and mobile payments that are becoming ubiquitous today. The less disruption your customer faces in their spending routines, the more pleasant their overall experience, in turn boosting your business’ reputation.
Ease of Reporting
However, when many banks and cards are involved, the amount of work that goes into tracing and capturing transaction data increases. Payment reconciliation is an essential part of every business, from issuing refunds and tracing fraud, as well as for financial accounting purposes.
With traditional payment solutions, your finance and accounting staff will have to be delegated to manually verify and reconcile transactions, a mundane task that is time-consuming and takes away their attention from other areas of their job scope.
A modern payment solution will be able to automate this process, freeing up your staff to focus on their other responsibilities and overall adding value to their work.
At the same time, a good payment solution will enable you to do more than just reconciliation. It can capture the finer details of every transaction, such as the time a purchase was made, the method of payment, the transaction ID, so on and so forth. Having all this information somewhere accessible is essential for tracing transactions in the event of disputes and refunds, and accounting for them when communicating with your banks. With your payment solution automatically recording all this information, it will save your team a lot of trouble when the situation arises.
Security
The sensitive nature of monetary transactions means that your system’s security has to be top-notch. A security breach is every business owner’s biggest nightmare, and if one were to happen, it can severely compromise your business’ integrity and reputation for many years to come.
At the same time, the management of such data needs to comply with regulatory obligations, which might be breached and incur harsh consequences if the data is not sufficiently protected, or worse, falls into the wrong hands.
A good payment solution will ensure that all sensitive data is stored securely and carefully in line with regulation. Ultima Asia Technology’s payment solution employs the use of an advanced security solution, tokenization, to ensure that your business processes remain unaffected, while at the same time protecting your valuable data and ensuring that only you can access it, even if an internal breach occurs.
Your payment solution affects much more than just your customer – your overall business operations can be improved greatly by optimising your payment process.