Typically when the Spreedly implementation team is brought into customer conversations, the organization has already made a big decision – payments here are changing.
The business may be expanding to accept digital payments, there is a new growth opportunity, or something about the current payments process needs to change. These changes also come with a timeline – someone has cut a check and time is ticking. This may be the ideal time for a delivery-focused partner to be added to your team. One thing we encourage our customers to also consider is – are you ready?
“Adventure is just bad planning.” - attributed to Roald Amundsen, Polar Explorer
While making changes to your payments orchestration may not be quite as complicated as reaching the South Pole, preparation is just as critical. Payments have broad reach within an organization. Getting paid is the lifeblood of profits and many systems rely on payment information to function.
Here at Spreedly we believe knowing the answers to a few key questions and a great partnership is the foundation for a smooth implementation.
Can you clearly define timing and the people and processes this will impact?
At Spreedly, we kickoff every new implementation with a chartering exercise which breaks down the scope of the project (including dates) and all the key players. We ask that everyone involved in the project is present for this session. Alignment is key. Some customers struggle to see the value in this exercise and/or have trouble communicating their vision. Those are usually the same customers that struggle throughout implementation.
We see a trend that implementations without strong motivators and vision can take four times longer than others. One customer ended up delaying their implementation after our kickoff when they discovered the development team needed to do the work was currently assigned to another project. While that is clearly not the desired outcome of our kickoff meetings, that customer was able to realign internally to set expectations on when their implementation would actually be completed.
The goal isn’t to gather all the requirements up front, waterfall-style; it is to set our teams up to work towards the same vision for the project. As a strategic partner enabling your payments ecosystem, and especially as a partner during the delivery phase, it’s important for us to work in alignment and enable you for fast adoption.
How will you know you are successful? Does success look different to different stakeholders?
Payments Orchestration implementations impact many groups across an organization. These stakeholders almost certainly have different visions of success.
For the developers, it may be as simple as getting to production on time and with no bugs. For other stakeholders, it may be data continuity; making sure that the data they need is maintained and visible. For the champions of Payments Orchestration, success may look like a resilient system with improving payments success metrics.
Good partners will want to know your vision and goals so that they can work with you to help you accomplish them. At Spreedly, we explicitly ask during chartering or during customer onboarding. Knowing the different success metrics guides the implementation consultants to collaborate with the team to meet everyone’s goals.
For example, one customer’s driving goal was to provide a frictionless checkout experience while maintaining strict fraud monitoring. Our Implementation Consultants were able to provide flow recommendations for balancing their fraud provider and gateways. Another customer wanted to closely monitor regional success metrics at launch. Our consultants were able to guide the creation of custom analytics dashboards that were able to be used at and post launch as well as offer suggestions for data collection that would enhance this reporting.
Knowing how you will monitor your key metrics helps prove the value of your implementation and can give you the tools you need to report to others as well
Are you willing to collaborate?
You’ve been transparent about your vision and the deadlines with your payments partners, why not work together to see what can be improved? Implementing payments orchestration is going to change how your current systems work. This is also a great opportunity for improvement in collaboration with your partners. Payments partners should be able to use the information you share with them to advise on the best way to use their tools. Sometimes these discussions lead to solutions neither team had originally, but end up being the best fit.
Recently, the Spreedly team partnered with a customer to ideate on how data collection was impacting their payments flow. The customer was collecting and storing information about each customer. They wanted this data to be stored in Spreedly’s vault, but doing so increased the number of API calls for each transaction. We were able to design a scalable solution that would accomplish the security goals of the customer while at the same time keeping the number of API calls the same. Without intentional collaboration this solution would never have been discovered.
With the answers to these questions in hand your payments orchestration implementation should be less of an adventure and more of a strategic journey. If you’re looking for a partner to travel with you, contact us.
Download the Payments Orchestration eBook Below
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