How Integrated Payments Can Halt Customer Attrition

This one is self-explanatory. Companies have budgets and are prone to choose a lower cost software provider given all other things are equal. Afterall, saving money is always a good thing as long as it doesn’t mean sacrificing quality, functionality, and/or value.

How can integrated payments help you retain customers who may be at risk of attriting for a lower cost solution? When it comes to software cost, clients typically pay both software subscription fees and fees for value-added services, including digital payment processing. By offering competitive merchant services pricing programs, you can help prevent customers from shopping for a better rate and potentially switching software providers due to dissatisfaction caused by over-inflated processing fees.

Software clients expect their applications to perform consistently and have the modern feature functionality that today’s users demand. When clients experience bugs, especially those that aren’t addressed in a timely manner, they may be eager to switch to a different provider. To minimize this attrition risk, it’s critical to have a constant pulse on the voice of your customer and a consistent and well-communicated process for addressing bugs. Both are paramount to building trust and creating loyal users. Because your third-party partners are an extension of the customer experience you deliver, your payments provider should share the same philosophy. Your payment partner’s commitment and availability to help you address any payment-related technical deficiencies can keep customers from walking out the door. Access to domain experts and hands-on support, in addition to developer resources, is key to minimizing attrition due to technical payment-related issues.

You’ve no doubt heard the phrase, “You never get a second chance to make a first impression.” In this case, your software onboarding experience sets the stage for the entire customer experience. Unfortunately, software providers often lose customers before they’ve even really won them, due to friction in the onboarding process. This includes not only their own software onboarding process but also those of value-added partners, including their integrated payments partner. After all, partners are an extension of your brand and clients don’t typically differentiate between where your software stops and your partners’ services begin. To combat attrition during onboarding, software providers should strive to provide a frictionless experience that extends to how your clients interact with your value-added partners. Your integrated payments provider can aide this effort by offering instant merchant boarding where clients can begin accepting payments in near real-time rather than the traditional process, which can take days or more. And when it comes to customer support, choosing a provider that aligns with your own customer service standards creates a consistent experience that keeps customers satisfied—and loyal.

Customers may switch software platforms because of new and better feature functionality with a competing solution. What role does integrated payments (and your provider) play in reducing this attrition risk?

Software providers can stay market competitive by keeping their integrated payments solution modern with tech features that today’s software users (and their customers) expect. Examples might include support for mobile payments and wallets, auto-pay options, auto-updates to card-on-file information, contactless and EMV payments, surcharge, and flexible funding capabilities, all of which create a robust, market-competitive solution and demonstrate the added value you’re able to deliver. By partnering with an integrated payments provider with a proven track record of commerce innovation and domain expertise in your specialty, software providers can minimize attrition due to falling behind in their payments tech stack.

Building brand recognition can feel like an uphill battle, especially for up-and-coming software providers. Prospects may be wary to invest in a brand they don’t know well, and even established clients can be enticed by a provider with better brand recognition. (Afterall, no one ever got fired for choosing Microsoft.)

If you aren’t yet an established brand, you can leverage the strength of your value-added partners’ brand reputation to gain recognition and credibility. By aligning with an integrated payments partner who is recognized as leader and innovator, software providers can elevate the perceived value of their holistic solution.

The reality is that businesses fail, and as a software provider, for the most part, the role you play in your customers’ survival isn’t material. However, positioning your customers well for success by providing the best possible feature functionality, including commerce-enabling payment technologies, is a great way to support them.