The pandemic has forced businesses to adapt to consumers, and the result is that many businesses have been looking into how to add new payment capabilities quickly with minimal impact.
Your customers want better payment experiences. So do your colleagues.
Better payment experiences
For years, smart businesses have understood the value and importance of providing their customers with better payment experiences. But in 2020, COVID-19 suddenly transformed these payment initiatives from an important priority into a business imperative.
As organizations have scrambled to adapt to a radically new set of shopping behaviors and payment expectations, one thing has become crystal clear: it’s impossible to offer the safe, digital-first payment experiences your customers expect when your own internal payment experience consists of a tangled mess of different systems, siloes, workarounds and data blind spots.
In other words, there is a crucial, unavoidable connection between your colleagues’ internal experiences and your customers’ purchasing experiences—and you need a payment solution that places equal emphasis on both. So what does that approach look like? And how do you create the conditions inside your organization to enable and accelerate better payment experiences for your customers?
Here are a few of the ways Cybersource can help you answer these important questions—and accelerate your digital payment transformation:
1. Choose a payment orchestration platform built for a digital-first world
Digital payment transformation doesn’t mean replacing all of your existing systems and processes. But it does mean finding a modular payment platform to leverage those systems where it makes sense—and then quickly add the additional digital-first building blocks you need to do business with anyone, through any channel, using any payment type, and with any acquirer you choose. By replacing the usual brittle mix of fixed and isolated payment capabilities with one flexible and open platform, you can gain the freedom to expand and adapt to new payment trends and customer expectations—no matter how quickly they develop or how often they change.
2. Create a unified, 360-degree view of your customers
In a digital-first world, you simply can’t afford siloed, incomplete views of your customers’ buying habits—especially as you work to add new channels and payment methods. A growing number of businesses are discovering that in addition to its well-known security benefits, tokenization can offer a safe and effective way to create a more complete view of their customers’ shopping behaviors.
For example, Cybersource Token Management Services links multiple payment tokens across different card brands, issuers, payment types and channels into one “token of tokens” that contains a complete transaction history for every customer. Using this expanded set of data, you can make all your customers’ shopping experiences more consistent, centralize the management of different payment types, and build the same customer loyalty and rewards opportunities into every online, mobile and in-store transaction.
3. Adopt a more complete approach to payments
As the digital-first payment landscape expands, so does your to-do list—whether it’s dealing with an ever-growing number of payment vendors or hunting through noisy, isolated data for the insights you need to understand your customers better. To control and manage all this unavoidable complexity, you need a way to bring all your different payment processes, systems and technologies together.
Cybersource provides that unity with a payment orchestration platform to manage and monitor all your transactions through a single cloud connection.
This more complete approach makes it possible to consolidate all of your different payment channels. It streamlines your reconciliation processes by providing a unified view of all your transaction data. It can even help you negotiate better terms with financial institutions by bringing higher, cross-channel transaction volumes to the table.
Visit our Payment Acceptance page to learn more about how Cybersource can make way for better payment experiences inside your organization and out.
