How Merchants of Record Orchestrate a Better Customer Experience

You’ve purchased many products and services online. And you know how important a great customer experience is to your overall impression of the vendor. A great customer experience means you’re much more likely to return to that vendor in the future. You’re more likely to recommend them to your friends and colleagues. And you’re more likely to stay with that vendor for subscribed services or future purchases.

There are many important aspects of that great customer experience to consider. Let’s take the example of a digital streaming service. A great sign-up experience means that you can easily validate that the service is right for you, find the plan you want, and pay for it quickly. Streaming providers have paid incredible attention to delivering a great experience when you’re evaluating the service. They obviously have a considerable focus on the programs they deliver. 

But when it comes to the most sensitive part of the transaction – when the consumer presents their method of payment – surprisingly little attention traditionally has been paid. That’s changing. Leading merchants recognize that a great customer experience falls flat if the payment experience is poor. 

That’s particularly true for merchants that rely on subscriptions or encourage return purchasers. A great payment experience keeps these customers transacting again and again.

Enabling a Digital Transformation for Merchants

Merchants increasingly know how strategic payments are to their customer experience. Payments can be complicated, and devoting resources to building a solid payments strategy means that developers and other internal parties are focused on security, compliance, and other management issues that could be more effectively done by a dedicated third party. 

Building an effective payments strategy is not only distracting, it can also be time consuming. If you are looking to expand into new markets and launch new products, you need the right mix of payment services. But building these functions internally can lead to costly delays that prevent you from entering new markets quickly. Again, outsourcing connectivity to a payment orchestration platform lets you access best-in-class technologies.

The desire to leverage multiple payment services is now the norm. In fact, 70% of today’s merchants prefer payment orchestration – or the approach of leveraging multiple payment services – versus relying on a single provider. 

By leveraging Payments Orchestration via Spreedly, merchants:

• Outsource your payments security, compliance, and connectivity to focus on the customer experience
• Launch new offers and enter new geographies faster by leveraging the right mix of payment services
• Optimize each transaction for revenue, cost, churn, and other critical customer lifetime value goals.

Let’s take a look at these benefits in more detail and how other merchants are delivering a better customer experience and maximizing revenue.

Boost Internal Efficiency and Agility of Your Payments Systems

As discussed, it’s vital that merchants provide a great customer experience for their consumers. But the complexity of payments means that it’s difficult for your teams to concentrate on differentiation when they’re too busy ensuring that they can securely accept and store payment methods. And when you execute initiatives to reduce fraud and boost success rates, they often lack the time to achieve the results you want. 

Payments Orchestration helps by enabling merchants to outsource payments compliance and security. A secure, compliant vault that’s portable gives you flexibility. Plus, when you outsource the development and maintenance of connections to the ecosystem of payment services, you can redirect developers toward core differentiation. Instead of expecting your team to be payments experts, rely on a team of payment orchestrators whose primary responsibility is payments.

In summary, orchestration helps:

• Cut compliance risk and cost for PCI, SCA / PSD2, and other regulatory requirements
• Shift your development teams to building value, while Spreedly manages and maintains the complexity of payment integrations 
• Leverage our experience across hundreds of deployments and billions of transactions to guide your payments strategy

Leverage the Right Mix of Services to Get to Market Faster

Your business has a demanding timetable to get into new geographies and launch new products. The growth of your company depends on launching successfully in these new markets. But if your business can’t accept payments from customers – or decline rates are unacceptably high – then your launch is in jeopardy and the business plan will fail.

Payments Orchestration enables you to choose the right mix of services to support your business strategy. Let’s say you’re a North American company entering the Latin American market and you need to leverage payment service providers that best support that region. Spreedly’s ecosystem of payment providers is the deepest and most complete. That means you can leverage the optimal portfolio of gateways to support your needs.

Quickly adding new services to your mix, without the cost and complexity of building connections to them, allows you to quickly get to market.

With Payments Orchestration, you land more business by:

• Entering new geographies faster and accepting payments locally via our premier ecosystem of payment services
• Boosting global revenue with increased authorization rates 
• Improving your customers’ checkout experience by accessing key payments functionality, like best-in-market fraud tools

Increase Revenue via Higher Success Rates

Increasing authorization rates and reducing false declines can have a major impact on your business’ revenue. An increase of 1-2% of revenue is significant. And that’s not including the follow-on transactions and revenue that come from renewing subscriptions or repeat purchases. 

With Payments Orchestration, you can refresh cards and keep them evergreen. Updated cards (via Account Updater or Network Tokenization) mean higher success rates, more revenue, and happier customers. Network tokens stay constantly updated, and Spreedly’s agnostic approach to network tokenization means you can reuse your tokens across different payment services flexibly.

Payments Orchestration also allows you to route transactions to the right gateway or payment service to optimize your authorization rates and costs. Leveraging our unmatched depth of data across providers, you can direct transactions to your preferred provider and hence increase transaction success rates.

That means that Payments Orchestration also lets you:

• Leverage the intelligence of the largest orchestration platform to ‘smart route’ transactions, boosting success rates and revenue
• Avoid fraud losses by accessing the best fraud solutions for your market and regional needs
• Keep stored payment methods evergreen – and transacting – with account updater and the first agnostic network tokenization solution

By leveraging Payments Orchestration, merchants of record are able to keep their development teams focused on building competitive differentiation into their customer experience. At the same time, they can dramatically boost revenue by optimizing transaction success rates and entering new markets faster.

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Download the Multiple Payment Gateways eBook Below