Build Customer Trust for Online Payments, Part 2
A positive online payment experience for your customers starts with trust. There are several best practices you can use to promote trust. Read our first blog on the topic.
Empower Better Customer Service with Real-Time Information
A common user action we often see is a person looking up their account information just to check their balance. This may happen directly following a payment. If your records are kept updated with real-time integrations, a person can make a payment and then immediately see that payment reflected against their balance. If there’s an information lag, a person would see a balance that doesn’t seem right to them, and they may even make a duplicate payment by mistake.
For staff, up to the minute information is equally important. If a person calls with a question about a recent payment they made, it’s important that staff members in customer service, finance, or another customer-facing agency are able to reference a person’s payment and immediately address their concerns. By directly integrating your payment solution to your obligation database, both customers and internal staff have the real-time facts about every payment.
Commit to Always Uptime
In today’s technology landscape, “uptime” is more than a binary “on” or “off.” Performance quality can influence business processes, and service degradation like a slowly loading confirmation page can lead to bigger problems like a duplicate payment. Always uptime ensures high-performance functionality as a critical matter. Payment providers should actively monitor performance and response times of the interconnected systems that comprise your web and payment environment, and automatically route customers to the highest functioning systems.
Process All Payments with Leading Security
The best way to earn your customers’ trust is by proactively securing their data. If you are building an application that will process or handle credit card details, that application should never store card and CVV numbers. In fact, storing this data is a massive violation of the Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard (PCI-DSS) and could result in hefty fines. In instances where you may need to refer to the credit card number, instead store a token with a non-sensitive value. This is a widely adopted industry practice known as tokenization. Tokenization allows you to refer to the credit card number by means of a value that you can store locally.
Here are a few common security mistakes that government tech companies make with online bill pay.
Trust is the Backbone of A Great Payment Experience
Making a payment doesn’t have to be painful. By combining easy and consistent user experience, helpful and proactive customer service, and secure financial technology, your customers will learn to trust — and even love — the payment experience you provide.
