Tuesday, January 5, 2016

Mobile Payment to Redefine Customer Experience

In order to remain as dominant force in the market and to retain/improve the customer base  during competitive era, organizations shouldn’t be looking for marginal improvements to existing business models instead they should create entirely new paradigm that completely modify  the way organizations interact with customers and their suppliers.

With the smart phone adoption becoming more wide spread and penetration of contactless payment between buyers and sellers on the rise, retailers and small businesses have been presented with an opportunity to redefine customer experience.

Scenarios which were envisioned as distant reality such as a visit to a supermarket or department stores by customers who use sensor embedded shopping carts with displays for price of the item as well as the total shopped amount as and when they select a product from the shelf are becoming order of the day.

When the customer leaves the store, payment services (like Apple Pay which allows Apple iPhones 6 and iPad to interact with point of sale systems using a near field communication techniques. Samsung Pay which allows Galaxy S6 and Galaxy Note 5 to interact at standard mobile payment terminals with magnetic stripe readers and at NFC terminals) are facilitating customers to make payment by waving their mobiles thus avoiding long lines.

With the customer authorizing these payment using fingerprints data stored on their phone and with the usage of unique dynamic security code for each transaction instead of transferring the amount using credit card numbers, the user gains better experience and security than OTP and secrete code days.

Smart phone are offering better security by adopting biometric (fingerprint, eye scan or facial recognition) mechanisms. This is opening up a new possibility of exceeding spending limit beyond customer’s credit or debit card limit while making it possible to provide high value transactions.

With contactless mobile payments making use of the same underlying infrastructure used to support contactless card payments the probability of contactless mobile payment overtaking other payment forms (including traditional payment forms such as credit and debit cards) remains high during the coming years.

These technological advancements happening in payment domain are providing organizations an opportunity to create new markets, new offerings, new ways to interact with customers, and to achieve value that was not previously possible.

While deployment of contact less mobile payment mechanism and embedded technologies provides a seamless shopping experience to the customer,  the sole responsibilities of in store customer service representatives are to assist and engage the customers during their visit - a redefinition of face-to-face channel offering.