Last year digitalisation accelerated in the finance industry as people had to find online solutions to traditional methods like cash payments and paper-based invoices.
According to McKinsey, the Coronavirus pandemic compressed a half decade’s worth of change into less than one year. Even areas that are typically slow to evolve saw significant change, such as customer behaviour, economic models, and payment processes. Shifts toward e-commerce, digital payments, instant payments, and cash displacement all skyrocketed in the past six months.
Recently, we explored ‘the butterfly effect of payments’, which refers to the way changes in the back-office processes can have a tremendous effect on the front-end customer experience. Today, we’ll look at why organisations, including those providing financial services, must embrace digital transformation to attract and retain customers.
Read on to discover how placing innovative and secure payment services at the heart of your value proposition will help you assume a leading position in an ever-evolving business environment.
The Importance of Customer Experience
Research conducted by Walker suggests that by the end of 2020, customer experience will overtake price and product as the key brand differentiator.
The service you provide your customers and how it affects their experience with your brand determines whether or not they choose to work with you. If buyers like your website and you offer them a seamless experience at every touchpoint, they are more likely to come back.
Exceptional customer experience is critical to creating sustainable growth since it promotes brand loyalty, reduces churn rate and encourages brand advocacy. Happy clients will likely become loyal customers, helping your bottom line by boosting revenue.
Today's customers have a wealth of service options, meaning they can easily find another company to meet their needs if you don't deliver. Providing an excellent customer experience is key to winning (and retaining) business.
Why Digital Transformation is Key to Meeting Customer Needs
Technology advancements like smartphones, apps, automation and instant payments now allow customers to receive what they want almost at the exact moment they want it. As a result, companies compete for the attention of the increasingly digitally demanding consumers.
The modern buyer has a good understanding of technology, especially in younger generations like Millennials or Gen Z. As such, these customers are more likely to spot inefficiencies and rate organisations based on the digital experience.
The fierce competition and buyers expecting on-demand services means transforming your company into a digital-first and agile organisation is more vital than ever. Businesses need to evolve and experiment to keep up with the accelerating customer demands.
Laggards who shy away from adopting new technologies risk falling behind and damaging their brand credibility when their methods become outdated.
In the Instant Economy, meeting customer demands requires effectiveness, modularity, speed, and global interoperability. Finding new, innovative methods to streamline your internal and external operations is crucial to providing a satisfying client experience. If you want to be a market leader, look to drive end-to-end payment performances by locating hidden process inefficiencies.
Implementing a robust payment platform, like Modulr, gives you greater visibility of your payment operation so you can find and eliminate methods that slow down your processes. Aim to push digital transformation, focusing on the straight-through customer experience.
Improving Straight-through Customer Experience
Straight-through processing (STP) is a well-understood payments term that refers to having unified processes through your tech stack. STP is an automated process completed purely through electronic transfers with no manual intervention.
A high STP rate creates a fast and accurate payment service while also shifting pressure off your employees. Monitoring the transaction process in real-time enhances your visibility without the time-consuming administrative work that typically comes with it.
Optimising your STP rate to provide high-speed, safe and flexible payments across your tech stack can go a long way to addressing inefficiencies and freeing up internal resources. A high STP rate means you can deliver that extra service boost that will impress even the most demanding customers. But industry leaders are going one step further and incorporating the customer's payments experience into the STP mix; it's all part of the same ecosystem especially with how the backend impacts the frontend. In this way, we think of straight-through processing as a straight-through customer experience.
Why Every Company Should Put Payments at the Heart of Business Strategy
Legacy payment procedures are slow and cumbersome, no longer equipped to keep up with the rapid pace of change of modern society.
No matter what industry you operate in and what services you provide, your customers want payments that are so smooth they barely notice them.
Areas companies should focus their payment transformation efforts on include, but are not limited to:
Automation
Payment automation removes hidden inefficiencies, reduces costs and improves your customer experience with real-time transactions. API platforms like Modulr help you manage and automate the flow of money for your company. Create and administer e-money accounts, and make payments, all via a single integration.
Embedded Payments
Embedding fintech solutions rather than reselling them improves margins and helps you deliver a suite of products that resonates with customers in your sector. Instead of redirecting customers to a third-party site, Modulr can help you embed payments into your own platform, allowing you to provide a seamless customer experience through a familiar, trusted and branded interface.
Secure & Scalable Platform
Your payment services should be secure and also allow you to grow your business. Modulr’s infrastructure is built to meet the highest security standards throughout the entire ecosystem. Additionally, our API driven foundation places scalability at the forefront, meaning you can manage one or one million transactions with the same simplicity.
Embrace Digital Solutions to Harness New Opportunities
The imperative is to accelerate your digital transformation, adopting new technologies that simultaneously improve operational efficiency at the back-end and customer experience at the front. Only businesses that act now and seize the competitive advantage can become leaders in the market race.
Modulr is uniquely positioned to help you identify and address the inefficiencies at the heart of your business that are holding you back. Our cutting-edge technology and extensive expertise empower us to transform your payment processes into an innovative and desirable option for modern buyers.
Now is the time to take a leap and start optimising your payments to improve user experiences, open up untapped addressable markets and harness new revenue possibilities.
To learn more about creating a positive experience for digitally demanding customers, take a look at our next blog.
Take Your Financial Services to New Heights with Modulr
Ready to take charge of your payment solutions to create an unbeatable customer experience?
Modulr helps businesses become market leaders through innovative and secure payment services that reduce customer churn and boost revenue. We help you unlock operational efficiencies and eliminate processes that cost you time, resources and customers.
Use our Payments Map to analyse the current state of your operations or contact us to transform your business today.
