Digital transformation is no longer just a competitive advantage but a key differentiator determining a company’s success in the current business climate.
In the past year, companies accelerated their digital transformation processes to keep up with ever-evolving customer requirements. According to McKinsey, the pandemic has forced many companies to accelerate digital transformation initiatives several years faster than if -the societal impact of the global pandemic hadn’t flipped the world upside-down.
The rise of the emerging Instant Economy in the last five years — where companies that provide instant experiences, information and services — has equally led to the rise of the digitally demanding customer.
The digitally demanding customer expects fast, intuitive and convenient solutions to meet their requirements, both in their consumer lives and professional lives. Their interaction with your company has to be smooth and hassle-free, nowhere more so than your payment services.
Our last blog discussed how digital transformation determines where companies are in the leaders/laggards race of the Instant Economy. This time, we’ll focus on the newly emerged digitally demanding customer and how your organisation can use payment innovation to satisfy their needs.
Keep reading to learn how streamlining your payment processes empower you to meet and exceed the digitally demanding customers’ expectations.
The Importance of Creating a Positive Digital Customer Experience
In the modern business climate, digital transformation is the glue that binds customers to brands. Companies that fall behind on digital progress (the ‘laggards’) could miss out on significant revenue opportunities as a result of poor customer experiences.
Even before COVID-19, digital technology had already started changing customers’ habits. Smartphones, apps, and contactless instant payments already existed. However, last year accelerated the use of these technologies, and now customers are accustomed to the convenience.
With so much information and choice available, it’s easier than ever for customers to take their business elsewhere if your company fails to live up to their expectations.
The Customer Journey 2.0: Delivering Dynamic Payment Experiences
Payment processing was once slow and tedious, but people accepted that most funds took an indefinite time to clear so long as it happened. Then came smartphones and Uber, and Netflix, and JustEat and Amazon. Today, customers expect the same fast, convenient and secure technology experience from your payment services.
Digitally demanding customers use the Instant Economy as a benchmark for customer experience, which we refer to as the Customer Journey 2.0.
The Instant Economy includes a collection of forward-thinking companies who integrate and use business services (such as payments) in new and flexible ways. Their goal is to achieve operational efficiency and deliver superior customer experiences. These days, new players — from digitalised corporations to neobanks — are constantly emerging with innovative payment methods.
Companies can also integrate brand new services, like advanced payment solutions, into their own ecosystems to accelerate growth and tap into new revenue streams. If they partner with the right payment system provider, organisations can leverage modern technology to provide bespoke-to-sector financial services.
These disruptive methods significantly raise the bar for other businesses regarding customer experiences and expectations.
How Payment Innovation Reduces Operational Costs While Still Exceeding Customer Expectations
Businesses today face a dilemma when it comes to digital transformation: how to cut operational costs while still satisfying the digitally demanding customer. Small changes internally can have huge external effects, so it’s important to pick the right solution. A complicated tool that doesn’t integrate well into your existing system could end up causing more delays while also costing more money.
So, how can a company achieve the seemingly impossible; creating a positive customer experience while spending less money on operational costs?
Bring Departments Together
To meet the demands of the Instant Economy, companies need to bring their business leaders together to work towards a common goal: improving operational efficiency and customer experience.
Collaborate with your department heads and supply chain managers to identify where your current operations need to improve. Bringing in different perspectives helps identify inefficiencies across your entire ecosystem and identify optimal solutions.
Locate and Eliminate Hidden Costs
On average, smaller companies spend almost £1m each per year on their back-office processes. For larger corporations (250+ employees), that figure rises to £2.1m. The most cited contributor to those costs are hours spent on manual processes, while 62% of business leaders believe that the hidden impact of poor payments cost them more than the hard expenses do.
Advanced payment platforms can rapidly minimise these costs by automating the processes your team usually handles manually. Digital payment automation also reduces the cost to process an invoice by 50% and speeds up the average time to collect payments by 62%.
Structurally streamlining your payments also helps to create experiences competitive with digitally demanding customers’ expectations. We've written about the Butterfly Effect of Payments before - check it out!
Create an Innovation-friendly Infrastructure
When companies implement new digital solutions, their existing systems often prevent them from fully utilising the potential of end-to-end digitalisation. To get the most out of new tools, you must build a foundation that supports payment innovation.
Only then can you maximise the opportunities to provide seamless and fast payment experiences that impress demanding customers.
Optimised Payment Solutions Are Key to Satisfying Digitally Demanding Customers
Our research has shown that businesses simply can’t afford to not invest in the digital strategies that digitally demanding customers expect. Only organisations that successfully integrate new payment capabilities while striving to improve customer service will benefit from the limitless opportunities of the digital, instant economy.
A reliable and fast payments solution must be at the heart of your services. Customers today want financial processes that are so seamless that they hardly notice them. Modern businesses must focus on their customers’ needs and leverage payment solutions that match those requirements.
But, meeting the expectations of digitally demanding customers is not about applying new methods as quickly as possible. Instead, aim to build a robust infrastructure to support payment innovation by replacing legacy back-office systems with new, digital ones. You should also focus on implementing fast and secure payment solutions that benefit all your stakeholders –– including customers, employees and supply chain partners.
Businesses that innovate with instant experiences for digitally demanding customers, employees and suppliers will become leaders of the Instant Economy. Front-runners delighting stakeholders with payment services that add value will leave their rivals behind.
The time for change is now. Are you ready to take the leap?
Prepare Your Business for the Future of Payments with Modulr
Impress digitally demanding customers with Modulr’s ground breaking API payment infrastructure.
We empower brands of all sizes to meet and exceed their customers’ needs and expectations to attract more clients, reduce churn rate, and increase revenue.
Use our Payments Map to analyse the current state of your operations or contact us to take your business to the next level.
