Over the last few years, the retail industry has evolved to cater to new shopping habits and consumer trends – particularly in the light of new NFC technologies such as Apple Pay. This has pushed merchants to re-think their strategies in order to serve the “omni-channel shopper”, who is keen to buy whenever, wherever and however he wants.

Merchants have typically set up each sales channel (e.g. online and in-store) separately, with dedicated resources, marketing teams and business processes for each one… But times are changing. Smartphones are impacting consumers’ routines and playing a major role in how they shop, how they make their purchases and even how they search for information about a product.

At the very core of this digital transformation, sits payments. The payment process is the narrowest part of the sales funnel, and a poor experience can cause even loyal customers to abandon their purchase. Omni-channel payments will improve customer service across all sales channels, build loyalty and ultimately drive revenue. Here is some advice to get you started:

1. Make the shopper experience as frictionless as possible

Address real pain points by installing innovative in-store technologies. For example you can eliminate checkout queues with mobile point of sale (mPOS) terminals, which enable staff to process payments anywhere on the shop floor. Or bring your online inventory in-store via kiosks that give shoppers access to the online store – meaning they can find and purchase additional sizes or colours even if they are not in stock.

You want to blur the lines between your sales channels so customers can shop at their convenience. This means supporting ‘click and collect’, where customers buy online and then pick up in-store, and accepting the return of online purchases in-store.

2. Three T’s

When deploying new technologies in-store best practice is to apply the so-called “three T’s” (Test in the physical environment, Train staff and identify Top champions).

a. Test in the physical environment

It is important to ensure that there is sufficient time to iterate and test different devices and steps in the processes. Identify KPIs to measure uptime, robustness or user-friendliness.

At a minimum, testing should involve a group of local employees, or ideally a control group of consumers that are willing to participate in a test.

 

b. Train your staff

This might seem obvious, but it is essential. Keep in mind that training should not only cover new tools and functionalities, but also the payment solutions you may wish to provide. This will ensure your sales staff are compliant with the PCI / data security requirements.

c. Top champions in physical stores

Appoint in-store ambassadors. These can be savvy employees or “power users”, who train other sales assistants and make them more comfortable with a technology. Sales assistants will only mention and promote the new technology if they see it as a complementary sales support tool and if they feel comfortable with using it. Additional incentives will also help.

3. Centralise payments management

Of course in order to offer services such as ‘click and collect’ or cross-border returns, your payments across all sales channels must be synchronized. But, if you have a large number of payments partners (PSP and acquiring bank) with separate contracts for each country, this can be difficult to achieve. It is therefore recommended that businesses looking to embark on an omni-channel journey, centralise internal back-office activities and limit the number of payments partners.

There is no “one big thing” to get right when it comes to payments-related practices to support omni-channel use cases. But there are many small and incremental changes that must be fine-tuned in order to deliver a great payment experience for today’s shopper.