Nine out of ten customers use a digital form of payment each year.
Not offering a digital way to pay isn’t an option. But to exceed your customers’ expectations and provide experiences that will strengthen customer loyalty, you need to do more than just give them options.
Your contact center needs to be digital-first.
Only then will you be able to offer the kinds of payment experiences your customers have become accustomed to in other areas of their lives.
Learn from eCommerce
Contact centers are still a bit behind the curve when it comes to digital payments. But instead of playing catch-up, get ahead of the competition by taking inspiration from eCommerce.
We can buy products online with the click of a button or using facial recognition to authorize a payment through Apple Pay or Google Pay. We don’t even have to re-enter our details every time we make a payment, they are automatically stored for us.
A digital-first experience will bridge the gap between eCommerce and traditional contact center payments. This is important because 91 percent of B2B buyers say a company’s purchase experience is just as important as its products or services.
Many contact centers offer key to pay, speak to pay and click to pay options, allowing customers to choose the option that best suits them. But to be digital-first, click to pay—enabling mobile payments—must be the leading option.
A decade of mobile payments
Apple Pay was launched 10 years ago, and other mobile providers quickly followed suit. Now contactless and mobile payments, like Apple Pay, are the top two preferred payment methods. 64 percent of companies already offer at least one mobile wallet option and 53 percent of Americans use digital wallets more than cards or cash.
When it comes to contact center payments, your customers want to be able to speak to an agent for human reassurance and support, but they want to make payments via a digital link, using click to pay.
That digital link should enable payment via Apple Pay or Google Pay, ensuring that your customers can complete the payment in seconds.
As we all know, this is far more efficient than manually entering long card numbers and expiry dates. ECommerce has made these completely frictionless and effortless ways of paying commonplace, so it is no surprise that this is what your customers expect.
AI-assisted payments
A major part of the digitization of contact centers is the rise of AI. More and more customers are using contact center self-service channels, such as conversational AI, particularly to resolve smaller issues or process smaller payments. And it works. Over half of the contact centers that have incorporated AI have experienced reduced wait times.
Conversational AI also enhances digital-first channels like IVR (interactive voice response) and chatbots. These channels help take the strain off overworked agents and give them more time to resolve complex customer challenges.
At PCI Pal, we have partnered with leading conversational AI providers, like Converse360, to automate the payments process.
Keep one eye on the future
A digital-first contact center should not only be up to date with the current trends but also prepared to adapt to and adopt whatever may come over the horizon.
Today, just one-third of organizations offer crypto as a payment option at checkout. But as more organizations invest in enabling crypto as a payment method, it’s likely to rocket from the least likely option to one of the most popular.
If your contact center is not digital-first, it will be an uphill battle to quickly integrate new payment methods.
In the time it takes you to prepare your legacy tech for a new payment method, your customers will have already left to a competitor who can provide what they want. Afterall, over half of customers will abandon a purchase if they can’t pay using their preferred method.
Prioritize digital-first payments and become the competitor customers flock to.
