Every customer’s shopping journey is unique. There are far more touchpoints between businesses and consumers than ever before, with more sprouting up all the time. In fact, Google studied customer journeys for various products and found that there could be 500 or more interactions, depending on the size of the purchase, before a customer commits to buying the item. On average, consumers are using close to six touchpoints in every purchase.

The elaborate pathways that consumers take to make a final purchase present big challenges to businesses, but also the potential for big rewards. In order to reap the benefits of offering a seamless, omnichannel payment experience, you need an innovative processing solution that is capable of supporting all of the payment options available to customers across these various touchpoints.

This discussion will explore the benefits of offering omnichannel payment options to your customers.

You’ll obtain more valuable customers.

In their analysis of omnichannel customers vs single-channel customers, Omnisend found that omnichannel customers were vastly superior, in terms of value, retention, and other key measures. Here’s a quick breakdown of the findings:

• Nearly a 19% higher engagement rate with omnichannel experiences.
• 250% higher purchasing frequency and orders were valued 13% higher for omnichannel consumers.
• 90% higher customer retention with a seamless experience across all channels.

When customers find a business that offers that seamless, omnichannel experience, they are willing to spend more money, purchase more frequently, and ultimately remain loyal to that business. Companies that execute a superior omnichannel experience witness a 9.5% year-over-year improvement in revenue and reduce their cost-per-contact by 7.5%.

You’ll meet consumer expectations.

The simple truth is that customers are increasingly expecting a frictionless experience across all touchpoints. This is why companies that do deliver this experience see higher revenues and more loyal customers. As this expectation and desire from consumers continue to grow, omnichannel capability will become a necessity for businesses to remain competitive.

To begin offering an omnichannel experience, you need a payment processing solution that is capable of handling different pay channels and payment options. This will help support that seamless experience your customers are so thrilled to find.

You’ll offer customer convenience and shorter lines.

With omnichannel payment options, you give customers the freedom to pay any way that they choose and from any platform, whether digital or physical. Not only does this deliver maximum convenience, it also makes for exceptional customer experience. Paying for a product or service is in itself a hassle. Any way that you can alleviate friction at this point in the journey is going to yield impressive benefits.

You may even be able to offer shorter checkout times because some payment options are much faster than traditional methods. For example, cash is incredibly slow and clunky, especially when the business needs to take the time to count the money and make change. NFC contactless and mobile payments, on the other hand, can take mere moments. This gets customers through the lines and out the doors much quicker, keeping checkout times low.

You’ll keep payment and financial records organized.

Omnichannel payment processing isn‘t simply accepting various types of payment. It also means creating a cohesive payment processing solution. This means the ability to accept different types of payments, from different channels, and process all of those transactions through a single platform.

For businesses, this eliminates the hassle and costs associated with having multiple merchant accounts for each unique payment option. Financial records will be much neater and more organized. You won’t have multiple streams of payments that you’ll need to blend together, but rather, one unified list of transactions.

You’ll take advantage of superior reporting and analytics.

When your payment streams and financial records are kept organized, it enhances your ability to monitor your sales data and extract valuable insights from the information. With everything compiled in that single, real-time stream, there are never any surprises or errors that go unnoticed. All payments can be quickly monitored and any errors can be corrected long before they evolve into bigger issues.

An innovative payment processing solution, like Inovio, will also provide a suite of business intelligence tools that simplify your analytics needs. You’ll be able to track customer behaviors, monitor sales performance, and detect payment trends that allow your business to better understand its slow and busy seasons.

You’ll put customers at ease with enhanced layers of security.

Fraud and stolen data are inescapable concerns and very real threats facing today’s consumers. That means offering secure payment channels is a non-negotiable necessity for every transaction. Customers will not commit their business or loyalty to companies that can’t provide high levels of security and demonstrate an ongoing commitment to keeping their sensitive data safe. 

PCI-compliant, omnichannel payment platforms make security a priority and offer access to a number of threat-prevention technologies. Not only is data encrypted at a high level, but these solutions also take advantage of tokenization security. This separates the lock from the key by giving shoppers a digital token that is required to read any of their sensitive data. Without that token, the information is a random string of characters that can’t be put back together.

You’ll utilize far fewer resources.

Whenever you have the opportunity to collapse several processes into a single platform (in this case, your various payment options/vendors) your business is able to save resources. Adopting omnichannel payment options helps save your company time, money, and other valuable resources.

With an innovative payment processing platform organizing your financial data, giving you access to advanced analytics tools, securing transactions, alerting you of chargebacks and fraud, and everything in between, you’ll have more time and resources to allocate to other processes and business needs. Perhaps, you’ll use those resources to further grow your omnichannel experience!

In conclusion.

The benefits of adopting an omnichannel approach to payment options are great, both in terms of their number and their positive impact on a business’ performance. That said, the one benefit that cannot be overlooked is the ability to meet customer expectations. With 87% of customers asking businesses to put more effort into providing an omnichannel experience, failing to take the right steps towards this objective means outright ignoring the needs of your customers. An omnichannel payment processing solution is an important step towards delivering the buying journey that your customers want and realizing your goal of offering a truly frictionless, cross-channel shopping experience.