Why Chief Market Officers should prioritise their payment strategy Part II

Part II - Redesign your instore experience by taking payments to the customer

Changing the way your business takes payments opens up new opportunities to redesign your customer experience upstream – from the physical location of payment terminals instore to helping you prepare for seasonal peak periods. 

Taking payments to the customer in the shop

Imagine you equip your retail staff with a mobile payment terminal, wirelessly integrated into your POS/ERP system so you can scan items and process payments – all from the same device. Bringing the payment to the customer helps to minimise “the pain of paying” and may enable a customer to buy faster.

You may no longer have to dedicate floorspace to a traditional checkout counter, and could use the newfound footprint to increase stock on the floor, provide more dressing rooms or dedicate more room for breakout areas to keep your staff happy.

Floating staff could be trained to engage the customer throughout the whole buying journey, as opposed to handing off a customer to the checkout counter. Imagine equipping your dressing room staff with a payment terminal so they can make a sale immediately after the customer tries on their clothes – staff could leverage the immediate satisfaction a customer feels when they’ve found the perfect piece that fits just right. Taking the payment to the customer is one way to help reduce the likelihood that a customer will abandon goods because they’ve reconsidered their purchase or they’ve spotted a long queue at the checkout.

Reduce queues

Queues are a proven reason that customers abandon a purchase and in some cases avoid entering a store altogether. In fact, for some businesses it could be a major source of lost revenue. The Australian Retail Association reported in 2017 that 70% of Australian retailers indicate a 5 minute wait time is the tipping point for most customers to abandon their items and leave. Designing your customer journey and retail space to reduce queues – for example, by incorporating mobile payment terminals - could help to close the gap on any lost revenue from otherwise willing customers.

Scale as you need to

Mobile payment terminals are also scalable – fixed location checkout counters may become a bottle neck in getting your customers served and out the door, while roaming checkouts can be scaled with relative ease by adding extra heads and devices. This could be especially helpful during peak shopping seasons, when surges of extra customers could overwhelm existing checkout processes.

Read the rest of our series “Why Chief Market Officers should prioritise their payment strategy” below:

Part I - Repositioning the role of payments in your sales cycle

Part III – Getting the most out of your eCommerce platforms

Part IV – Omnichannel and the rise of live social selling

ANZ Worldline Payment Solutions provides payment technologies that can benefit Australian businesses.

To find out more about how we can help bring your customer payment experience to life, get in touch today. 

ANZ Worldline Payment Solutions means Worldline Australia Pty Ltd ACN 645 073 034 (“Worldline”), a provider of merchant solutions. Worldline is not an authorised deposit taking institution (ADI) and entry into any agreement with Worldline is neither a deposit nor liability of Australia and New Zealand Banking Group Limited ACN 005 357 522 (“ANZ”) or any of its related bodies corporate (together “ANZ Group”). Neither ANZ nor any other member of the ANZ Group stands behind or guarantees Worldline.