Multi-channel business enterprise and knowing customer behaviour

MadesWehmann541 — Wed, 30 May 2012 12:03:21 +0000

Over the last twenty years, the way in which consumers interact with brands has changed beyond recognition. It used to be that a customer would walk into a store, pick something off the shelf, pay for it and leave through the front door. Now, its a totally different story.
Todays customers make much of their big purchase decisions at home before they even enter a store, comparing reviews and finding the best deals on websites and social networks. The rise of the smartphone is making a significant impact, allowing consumers to make comparisons while on the shop floor, perhaps even purchasing a product from one retailer while in the store of another.
And this is just the start. Customers expect to mix and match these channels in a way that suits them – maybe buying an item online and returning in store, or ordering over the web, while using loyalty points that theyve earned through purchasing in a catalogue. Having the ability to transact with a customer in any channel is clearly becoming a critical capability.
The bigger picture is even more interesting. Now that customers are interacting with merchants using multiple channels, retailers and merchants are beginning to wonder what they can learn from this activity. Wouldnt it be a nice idea if we could tie everything we know about our customer behaviour, and then use this information to enhance these relationships, provide better customer service and ultimately increase sales conversion rates?
My personal background is building retail systems – an area where, in the past, such unification has proved extremely difficult to achieve across multiple channels. Today, advances in modern technology are helping to break down the siloes, but there is clearly a lot of work left to be done to provide a seamless and consistent customer experience.
For me, the merchants Holy Grail is to be found in combining detailed insight into individual customer behaviour with personalised offerings, across all channels of interaction.
Understanding customer behaviour across channels is not a trivial exercise. Contrary to what your market researcher may tell you, the best way of understanding a customers behaviour is by tracking what customers actually bought, not what they said they would buy.
One great example is what Tesco and Dunnhumby have done extremely successfully with the Clubcard scheme – which allows Tesco to gather meaningful customer behavioural information by identifying a Clubcard user through their unique number and tracking every transaction they make. This information is then used extremely effectively to shape merchandising and offers to individual customers. Loyalty schemes like this, however, can be extremely complex and costly to set up, which is why few other retailers have implemented comparably sophisticated schemes of their own.
There is another potentially much simpler way of tracking a customer and generating insight into their behaviour, and thats through their payment card number. Having a solution in place that can take card payments across all of the different channels already solves most of the problem. If that same solution provides a unified tokenisation strategy that allows the use of a customers details across channels in a PCI compliant way, then the picture becomes even more compelling.
I strongly believe in the future of multi-channel business, and at Servebase we will continue to invest heavily in developing our capabilities in this area. We can provide a tokenised solution that allows merchants to transact and track consumer spending across channels without compromising security. And with that you can begin to really understand behaviour and enhance the customer relationship. Perhaps the Holy Grail is not that far out of reach after all .

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GarickSantai529 — Fri, 25 May 2012 12:15:13 +0000

In the present harsh economic times, many people are gearing towards starting online businesses. Why? Not only do they save up on space payments but also considerably cut on start-up costs. You also save up on insurance and utility costs. Many business owners are incorporating this idea into their systems, and after some period of time, they intend to be entirely online based. If you set up an online based business-be it large-scale or small-scale, most of your services payments will be through cards. If you do not accommodate or accept card transactions, then you will lose an immense number of sales. What most clients look for is the plastic money service, and if you do not accommodate or accept them, they move to another website which will accept their mode of payment. A recent study showed that those online businesses that accept credit card payments have sales up to 400% higher than the ones which dont.

The easy way in which you can set up your business to accept card payment is amazing. For the set up, you have two alternatives. You could apply for the traditional merchant account at a bank. With this choice, you will have to pay the set up fees and an extra charge every month. The other option is to look for a card processing company online, which provide you with credit card services, without charging any set up fees. For a small business or if you are just establishing or starting an online business, you have to check and find a reliable card processing service provider. At first, you will not be able to foresee how many transactions you will undertake per month. Therefore, avert going for the lower transaction fee-higher monthly payment. Until you are certain of the number of transactions in a month, you should go for the higher transaction-lower monthly pay fee. With the latter option, you will pay for each transaction and about $10 per month.

Thorough research and scrutiny of the online card processing providers will ensure that you sign up with the right company. You should be attentive to any company that offers bonuses and extra applications. You should choose a company that will be able to alert you, through your phone or mail, of any credit card payments and transactions. It will cost you considerably less if you accept $70 credit card payment than creating, printing and mailing an invoice to the client. Whether you are starting a small online business or extending your already successful business, accepting card payment will substantially decrease debts. This will increase the overall cash flow hence increasing profits for the business. Constantly making high profits will ensure the prosperity of your business.

All in all, you should be familiar with the overall credit card processing procedure. It is essential to know what your business needs or requires and how you can make it happen. Dont lag behind because it will undoubtedly cost you a great deal and to some extent, even your business. Credit card processing is crucial, and it will lift your business to greater heights than it has ever reached.

Accepting cash payment is one of the though task for online businesses, thus they consider payment through credit card processing, where everything is handled by the banks that minimizes the hassle.

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Multi-channel business enterprise and knowing customer behaviour

On line visa or mastercard payments for your small business…