Mr.Sanjeev Patil, CEO, Girmiti Software.
With the rapid evolution of new-age technologies, payments landscape is witnessing multi-fold development. Cashless payments are shaping Retail sales experience by offering convenient and unified payment transactions. Retail payments are ever changing and evolving; it has come a long way from traditional debit/credit cards to digital contactless payments including mobile wallets payments and many more.
Customers are also more inclined towards frictionless payments, as it is providing enhanced and palpable transactional experiences. Hence, retailers are predominantly focusing on ensuring seamless purchase and payments experiences to customers through improved value and security.
Enhanced customer experience; value that influences digital payments growth:
Digital Payments are not just delivering convenience anymore; It has become an approach to enrich customer experiences. Digital payments are reimagining the way the customers make their retail transactions; They are empowering retailers in providing differentiated customer experience in a store or online. Retail users are looking for comfort and wish to have the feasibility in making their purchase decisions; Some customers browse through the store to find the product and make the purchase at the convenience of online. Few do the vice versa; they explore the products on the website or app and visit the store to make a purchase. To meet the expectations of customers, retailers are taking innovative and integrated approaches of unifying digital and in-store channels and ensuring the customers, a fulfilling shopping experience.
Advancements like Mobile-POS(mPOS) has been enabling customers with a greater checkout experiences. Streamlining the transactions between customers and a retailer, mPOS payment solutions are reducing human error that stems from cash payments. mPOS lessens the discomfort of waiting in long lines to make purchase at dedicated POS locations by offering one-to-one attention to the customer, and thus delivering customized shopping experiences.
Lately, Mobile Wallets has been the most common way of payment, which is reshaping the shopping experience of customers through its diverse features. They offer significant value to the retailers beyond payments and have become imperative for enticing customers by influencing their purchase process. With the payments in the background, Mobile Wallet unifies loyalty programs, gift cards and other branded content to boost user’s engagement.
Retail brands are also venturing into creating their own mobile wallets with integrated loyalty programs to enhance customers’ experiences in fund transactions or purchases. It empowers retailers to mobilize loyalty programs with customized real-time offers that reinforces the relation between retailer and customer. Retailers are also integrating commonly used mobile wallets in the payment methods, as they are more accessible and thus effective in driving in-store traffic.
Digital transactions augmented rapidly with the seamless adoption of new-age payment technologies like NFC, QR or bar code, bio-metric. Contactless payments using NFC technology is another innovation in digital payments that has become the latest trend in payments. Leveraging the ease of tapping mobile or card against POS device, customers are making fast transactions.
To offer top-notch customer experience, digital payments enable customer-centric retailers with multiple payment channels and methods, which can be integrated together to ease the process of payments. It provides unified payments experience and fulfils the customer’s expectations of flexibility in making payments using their preferred method.
Improved Security; Enhancing the usage of Digital payments:
Though people are adapting to new-age digital modes of payments; queries persist over the security that they deliver. Most of the complaints on digital payments are regarding the failures in the electronic transactions, unauthorised funds transfer, failures in refunding money in case of a failed transactions, failures in loading funds into the wallet. However, experts pronounce that most of the digital transactions are absolutely traceable and can be resolved.
With different security tools employed during the process of transactions, fraudulent acts can be attenuated and can provide great security to the customer’s card data. Digital payments offer improved security compared to the card transactions.
Tokenization is one of the most widely used methods in digital payments to safeguard customer’s card data and helps in seamless transactions. Tokenization mitigates the effect of security breaches for retailers and provides more convenient & secured shopping experience to the customers. Mobile Wallets and apps proliferate safety by adding layers of security through single-factor or multi-factor authentications. Generally, these authentications would be bio-metric or a pin or a combination of both, that make wallets or apps avoid potential fraudulent acts.
Recognizing the value that digital payments provide and realizing the necessity, small merchants started to offer digital payment solutions, which customers prefer too. As the concerns have been addressed steadily, consumption of digital payment methods is growing phenomenally.
Retailers have to comprehend that payments do not work with the prototype of “one-size-fits-all”. The essential purpose of a retailer is to integrate all the offerings into a single platform that could ease the payments and satisfy the end users with customized secured payment solutions.
