The ability to establish and maintain trust with clients is the foundation of “every successful business,” according to UK-based Fintech Modulr.
And, while customer trust might be one of the more “intangible” corporate assets, it’s one that can be “felt keenly on the bottom line,” the Modulr team writes in a blog post.
Because, as research has revealed, clients “won’t part with their hard-earned cash (particularly online) if they don’t trust you and your processes.”
Modulr adds that delivering a “top-notch” customer experience will go “a long way to building trust.” The Fintech firm also noted that as more and more customer experiences are delivered through online channels, digital payments have “become of critical importance – central as they are to the modern-day user experience.”
The company also revealed that they embarked on some quantitative research to “find out what consumers thought a trusted payments experience actually looked like, aside from the best available security and fraud protection.”
Modulr reportedly asked several important questions and the customers have spoken.
So long, “analogue consumerism”
Modulr points out:
“Nowadays, we’re all digitally demanding. Our survey results show that the days of analogue consumerism are long gone. The digital consumer is here and we’re no longer just talking about digital natives (those who were surrounded by technology from their birth in the new Millennium). Older generations have broken free of the digitally dismissive stereotype and the results have uncovered overarching and intergenerational behaviours and expectations.”
Your clients, regardless of their age, have “high expectations around the speed and delivery of payments.” Modulr also mentioned that digital payment experiences are already “an intrinsic part of their everyday lives and, as a consequence, issues of security and trust are high on the collective agenda.”
They company also shared:
“As the world becomes more reliant on digital services, the overwhelming majority of those surveyed now feel at greater risk online then they did 18 months ago. This sentiment is felt most acutely by the younger demographics, who were also (rather surprisingly) most likely to describe themselves as ‘average’ in their adoption of digital payment services – stating that they tend to use them when most people they know already use and trust them.”
Payments are critical to customer experience, “occurring at the time when the customer, having evaluated your proposition, acts on the buying decision.” Failure to recognize the importance of delivering a trustworthy experience at this important juncture “may result in businesses losing customers, cash flow and reputation,” according to Fintech firm Modulr.
The majority of those surveyed said “they’re more likely to trust a brand that invests in modern, customer-friendly payments processes.” And over half say that “a trusted payments experience would encourage them to use the online service provider again and reward them with their loyalty,” the team at Modulr revealed.
And what are the “key elements of a trusted payments” experience?
Based on our research, there’s a “clear formula for success.”
As noted by Modulr, instant payments, instant notifications and “ease of use rank highly as far as trusted payment experiences go.” These fuel loyalty and “increase both spend and the likelihood that your customers will recommend you,” Modulr noted.
The company added:
“With modern processes like real-time APIs that allow for intelligent, automated payment flows, there’s no excuse for tardy payment processing which lacks trust and transparency. Nowadays, outbound payments can be made 24 hours a day, all year round and often fulfilled within seconds via the UK payments scheme Faster Payments.”
They further noted that inbound funds can be “automatically reconciled and cleared quickly, with balances updated in real time; allowing brands to deliver a superior customer service.” After all, if a customer can “track their takeaway right to their doorstep, surely the same technology should be available to track their £40,000 house deposit through the payments ether, right?”
The research showed that embedded payments also “give peace of mind, save time and build trust.”
Embedded financial services are “the reason the non-traditional financial services providers and online marketplace innovators such as Amazon, eBay, Etsy, Deliveroo and Uber are winning at the customer experience game.”
They’ve acquired “an edge over traditional businesses by offering payments and other financial services within their platforms as a core capability; allowing customers to leverage a greater range of functionalities without ever leaving their brand,” the team at Modulr added.
Notably, there are tools currently available, such as Modulr’s Payments Map Analysis, which can “help you identify the pitfalls in your customer journey and the steps you need to take to ensure the experience you offer your digitally demanding customers is a unified, integrated and ultimately trustworthy one.”
The fact is that the infrastructure required to support and enable a trusted payments experience has become a key business building block and “as critical as any other transport network.”
Even the most agile innovator may be able to benefit from outsourcing its payments processes (and the associated compliance and regulatory requirements) to infrastructural Fintechs like Modulr. This gives them “greater scope and flexibility to respond to shifts in customer behavior,” the company noted.
Surrounding their core systems with microservices and third-party APIs to access functionalities like Faster Payments and embedded payment innovations “will go a long way to delivering the trusted payments experience of the digitally demanding’s dreams.”
For more details on this update, check here.