Modern businesses are often at pains to say that what they do is not just about making money. They like to make a difference or provide a service or fulfil a mission beyond that. But let’s be honest. Making money is fundamental to business. Therefore, the details of financial transactions really matter.
It’s one of the great ironies of business that these transactions are often sources of serious friction in the customer experience. In retail, it’s long queues at checkout. In restaurants, it’s struggling to get the attention of a member of staff to ask for the bill. And then being sat waiting for 15 minutes before it makes its way back to your table.
It shouldn’t be like that, of course. As a business, you rely on that all-important transaction. The last thing you need is customers abandoning purchases because the queue is too long. Or diners leaving disgruntled and deciding they won’t come back again.
But that’s the reality of things. Or at least, it has been. Because, quite rightly, business owners are no longer prepared to put up with below-par operations that damage their brand and their bottom line. They know their customers deserve and expect better.
The good news is that, thanks to advances in POS technology, business owners can now deliver the kind of seamless payment experiences their customers deserve. Here are our tips for making it happen.
Increase your payment options
At one time, businesses were limited to what we might describe as manual payment methods – taking and counting cash, writing a cheque, even processing a credit card via a swipe machine could eat up time. That is, of course, no longer the case, with a whole range of digital and contactless payment methods available.
Similarly, in the past the only way to add extra capacity to your point of sale would be to add more staff and more POS terminals. This would be hard for many small retailers and completely impractical for most restaurants. But with self-service kiosks and the option to equip staff with mobile POS tablets, adding extra POS capacity is within reach of all businesses.
Combining the two – giving customers more ways and more opportunities to pay – is a critical first step in reducing wait times at point of sale and making the whole process more convenient for customers.
Take payments mobile
We mentioned mobile POS tablets above as a way to increase transaction capacity. But they do more than that. Mobile payment options add a level of flexibility and convenience that fixed position POS solutions, both staffed terminals and kiosks, cannot match. We can see from the fact that mobile payments made from smartphones now top $7 trillion annually that people like to pay for things on the go, in their flow as they do other things. The same logic applies to payment experiences in a shop, a restaurant, a bar etc. Bringing payments to the customer reduces friction.
The benefits of this are arguably most obvious in restaurants. Waiting staff carrying mobile POS tablets can tap in an order at the table and take payment there and then, completely eliminating the awkward after-meal wait for the bill. But the principle can be applied successfully to any customer-facing sector.
Embrace alternative payment methods
Innovation in payments doesn’t end with the wide choice of contactless options now available. Whether it is Buy Now, Pay Later (BNPL) to help customers spread the cost of big ticket retail purchases, or scan-and-pay using QR codes in restaurants so diners can settle a bill at their own convenience, more and more alternatives to cards and cash are emerging all the time.
Many of these new forms of payment bring a double benefit. They are usually designed to address a specific friction point (like scan-and-pay tackling the wait for a bill to be brought), and are therefore ideal for improving the payment experience. But they also further extend the choice available to customers.
For example, a forgotten or misplaced card would traditionally mean a lost sale and considerable embarrassment for the customer. Now, with more and more alternatives available, there are back-up options to pay through their smartphone etc, even without a digital wallet set up. That’s good for the business and for customers.