No matter what industry you’re in, technological convenience has altered your buyer’s expectations for every digital interaction. In today’s market, every business is pressed to deliver what’s known as “digital parity” to match the highest level of ease and advantage that your customer has experienced in an online or self-service solution — or risk becoming obsolete.
In the age of instant gratification, customers expect payment options — like every aspect of their buying experience — to be efficient, low-cost, intuitive, easy to mold to their specific needs, and ideally, internationally compatible. And although the resulting experience created by these advances may feelsimple to customers, it’s easy to forget that this ease is a function of an elaborate digital infrastructure that grows more complex every year.
As consumers, we expect more because we know that more is possible — but for businesses, achieving that level of ease and efficiency requires the right combination of expertise and technological innovation. To excel in such a digitally-driven climate, businesses need to understand their competition and recognize areas where they may be under-delivering on the customer service front.
For digital payments, giving customers “more” means leveraging a digital banking substructure that ushers your payment from point A to point B in the most adept and economical way, providing users with instant feedback and transparency into every aspect of the transaction process. When you consider the pervasiveness of mobile banking apps and the fact that Americans now pay more than half of their bills online, it’s increasingly likely that the average customer has been exposed to a variety of digital payment platforms, payment structures and user interfaces — all of which have colored their expectations for how digital financial transactions should be executed.
In the digital age, the ability to transfer money electronically and see it instantly disappear and reappear in the appropriate account is taken for granted. But what does that process involve? And what digital financial capabilities are important to the modern customer?
What customers expect from digital payments solutions
Along with transparency, users expect online platforms to remember and autofill their personal payment information and preferences upon their return — trusting that any data they share in a payment platform will be properly stored, retrieved and fortified against fraud. Advanced security and data storage capabilities thus reward customer loyalty by offering an advanced level of ease and automation to return customers — something marketplace giants such as Amazon have capitalized on by making one-click buying options available to members.
The right payment platform can also offer customers and merchants a means of cutting costs. Increased automation and real-time insight into international exchange rates means that business of all sizes don’t need to rely on large banking institutions to execute money transfers and exchanges (and can instead use what they save in overhead costs to offer their customers more competitive prices).
Furthermore, in today’s fluid international marketplace, our expectations surrounding monetary transfers aren’t limited to our own borders — we expect the same ease, security, compatibility and efficiency with cross-border payments that we do with domestic transfers. And though the expectation is simple in premise, differences in international laws and regulations add another level of complexity to digital payments that must be built into a given payment platform’s infrastructure to guarantee its success.
As today’s customers look to the web to improve their lives, advances in e-commerce technology have presented one of the greatest opportunities for doing so, offering them more buying options alongside greater ease. For the merchant/consumer relationship, seamless digital payment integration can be fundamental to gaining customer trust, satisfaction and loyalty. To learn how to boost your customers’ payments experience, request a discovery call today.
