In order to increase sales, build a customer base, and stay competitive in the market, you need to offer the best customer shopping experience. You don’t want your customers or staff to experience a frustrating payment process, whether it’s over the phone, online, or using web-chat. The customer may look elsewhere for their future purchases or a sale may be lost.
Consumers today have high expectations. When it comes to securing their personal information, customers expect convenience and security from your business. Considering the recent huge data breaches that have affected major brands, cardholder data (CHD) needs to be trusted with your company.
Additionally, the process must be straightforward, free of obstacles, dropped calls, long call queues, and complicated systems.
When you want to improve the payment journey for your customers, consider these factors:
Don’t Ask Customers To Read Out Their Card Details
Increasingly, consumers are aware of what information they share, how it is shared, and with whom it is shared. Dealing with fraudulent activity after a customer purchases with your organization would be a nightmare in terms of their customer experience. Do you know if an agent wrote the card details down if someone nearby overheard them reading out the details, have your systems been compromised resulting in a data breach?
You might have spent valuable time on the phone with a customer discussing their order, upselling additional products, and explaining terms and conditions. You may lose a sale and a valuable customer if it reaches the payment stage and the customer is uncomfortable giving out sensitive payment details over the phone.
Payment information needs to be handled in a secure manner if customers are going to trust you. Nothing sensitive is said out loud when the customer enters their card details into their telephone keypad. Neither the agent nor your IT systems see compromising data, and the payment is processed immediately, not saved. You could also request that they make process online payments with Inoviopay.
Ensure That You Are Always In Full Conversation
Customer conversations should be ended only when the order has been placed, with minimal interruptions. It’s important not to direct them to a specialist payment team, who will have their own calling queue, nor do you want to ask them to ring back on a secure line. Throughout the entire payment process, your agent will build up a good rapport with the customer that can be maintained uninterrupted. This will result in a positive overall experience.
Your customer service agent must be able to talk to the customer at all times when using a telephone payment system. There’s nothing worse than losing a sale because the customer can’t enter their credit card details, won’t answer the callback, or can’t reach someone from the payments team.
Simple To Use And Deploy
The use of cloud-based payment systems and flexible licensing models allows for faster deployment within an organization. The system should be easy to use and intuitive so that customers do not need to undergo lengthy training.
The ability to easily scale up and down your system is helpful if you employ temporary or working-from-home agents.
When you use a simple and reliable service, you can save hours by not having to continually troubleshoot issues, cope with technical glitches, and become irate when your customers call. Your staff will reflect their negativity in their call quality if they begin to resent the system they use every day.
Are your customers really interested in your agents having to apologize and complain about the system they use?
Make Ordering Faster By Saving Card Information
Having to provide payment information every time a customer places an order with you will be very frustrating. You can make ordering again in the future by offering the ability to save their card details. Even if it saves only a minute or two per payment, it could add up to a substantial saving for your organization over time. Moreover, you save your customer time, which is also a major win.
As you can see, there are many ways that you can improve and help your customers when making payments for your services or products. It is an essential part of customer service that often gets forgotten. By making sure you provide the best payment options and route, you are minimizing the risk of losing customers during the payment stage. One of the best things you can do is to fully train any customer service or sales staff to understand the importance of simple payments. Do you have any other tips that you share?
