The importance of insight for the management of payments

Peter Drucker (1909-2005) one of the most widely-known and influential business thinkers famously said: “You cannot manage what you cannot measure”.

For organisations looking to grow or expand, there is nothing more important than customer insight. How much do you know about them? Their behaviours, preferences, actions and irritants? How easy is it to access and interpret this information?

Many businesses that are selling online find it a challenge.

Their digital and payment platforms may have evolved over time, perhaps through a developing product line, geographical expansion, or channels using separate payment providers.

This has created fragmented customer journeys and experiences.

Any insight that could be gained at a macro level to impact business growth and success becomes unreliable or inaccessible. Manual intervention is required; different payment stacks exist for different markets (and none of them talk to each other); hidden data points create a lack of visibility on any single customer view.

All of this makes it difficult to leverage opportunities. Time and money is wasted, and customers don’t receive an optimal, joined-up experience.

So, what’s the solution?

For the vast majority, ripping it all up and starting again simply isn’t an option.

Instead, payment orchestration provides flexibility, insight and control.

A connection through a single platform that opens up payment choices for each transaction. It enables businesses to operate multiple brands, business lines and channels through a single 1:1 integration with separate payment providers. Which means greater choice for every customer, regardless of location or payment preference.

If you can route payments based on your own business rules, not only do you get a more resilient infrastructure for all your payments, but you can ‘tidy up’ the complexity of payment pathways, and join up customer interactions to create a more personalised service.

All of this will have a significant impact on ecommerce businesses with complex payment requirements, but where does critical knowledge and insight come into it?

One of the biggest issues for ecommerce enterprises comes from abandoned carts. In fact, over 37% of UK consumers abandon a purchase at checkout because their preferred digital payment option isn’t available. And in some age groups, “nearly half of consumers have abandoned a transaction due to lack of digital payment options” (Source – OnePoll/ Modularbank – UK 2000 consumers 2020)

By bringing together all of your payment information into one place, you can attribute your abandonment rate, highlight behaviours, identify trends and adopt changes or innovations swiftly.

But if you have no way of knowing what’s going wrong, you can’t even begin to fix the problem.

In an increasingly digital world, businesses are having to adopt a ‘think global, act local’ mentality when it comes to the management of payments. With elevated customer expectation, and pressure increasing on ecommerce organisations to deliver consistent branded experiences regardless of channel, one size clearly cannot fit all.

Flexibility and choice will become differentiators for consumers. And for businesses, the opportunity to expand and innovate will always be based on their ability to truly know and understand their customers.

To get more insight into your payment process, contact the BR-DGE Builders today.