How to Explode Your Customer Satisfaction Through Payment and Billing Options
If you’re doing business online, payment and billing processes have probably the most direct impact on customer satisfaction.
Make sure you’re not driving customers away with something that could be easily resolved.
Customer satisfaction is one of the biggest factors in driving a successful businesses.
In fact, customer satisfaction plays such a decisive role in whether you get recurrent sales and retain customers, no business can afford to overlook it.
It can be achieved in many different ways, such as offering great quality products, helpful customer service, or technological innovations.
Unfortunately, many business owners do overlook that customer satisfaction can be significantly increased through a successful and convenient payment and billing options. These options are important throughout the entire sales process, as well as during the aftercare.
In fact, if your customer is not satisfied with your payment and billing procedures, they might end up abandoning their purchase entirely.
Today, let’s take a look at six fail-proof ways that boost customer satisfaction through effective payment and billing. Read on to find out what they are.
1. Be secure
The first thing you want to do is to ensure that your payment methods are secure.
Customers want to be assured that they are browsing a protected web page, that they are entering their payment details into a secure system, and that you won’t store any data that you don’t need.
In order to make this happen, you should first get the best level of protection you can for your web site and the transaction process. Then, from the level of the payment page, you can let your customers know that they are protected. Add a provision about data retention procedures and give your clients an insight into your privacy policy.
Those subtle, yet smart moves will create a professional image and give your customers the confidence to trust you with their money and personal information.
2. Remove hidden fees
What distinguishes successful businesses from average ones?
The way they treat customers.
All individual and corporate clients deserve your utmost respect, therefore you should not surprise them with hidden fees and sneaky charges. Best practice is to put all your fees, including delivery prices and information about taxes, in an easy to find section of your website, so that when your customers click through to the checkout they know exactly what to expect.
3. Offer lots of options
Customers want to be able to pay in a way that suits them.
Some people have PayPal accounts for online shopping, others want to pay using their debit or credit cards. There are even those who want to make a direct bank transfer.
If you are taking payments in person, you will want to cover a range of card types, as well as be able to accept payments via apps or virtual wallets if possible.
While you don’t want to make things needlessly complicated by having dozens of options, you should make sure to at least offer the most popular payment methods on the market. This way, customers can comfortably check out using the payment method that they prefer.
4. Make regular billing easy
If you are setting up a subscription service or taking regular payments from customers, make it easy for this to happen.
Allow your clients to save their payment details if they want to, so that they don’t have to enter them every single time they buy from your website.
Set up direct debits or standing orders on their behalf so that all they have to do is to give their consent and confirm their purchase. In order to secure continuity of business with regular clients agree on a fixed date to make the billings. Most businesses choose to bill on the first or last business day of the month, but the choice is up to you.
A billing process that is logically organized and coordinated makes it easier for your clients to plan their budgets and increases your chances of getting paid regularly.
5. Be transparent about your cancellation process
No one wants to be locked into a recurrent payment structure without knowing how to get out of it.
The majority of your customers are going to want to know what your cancellation policy is before making a purchase or signing up for a subscription service.
This ties back to trust and security issues, as making it difficult to cancel payments will leave customers wary of setting them up at all. If the cancellation procedures are too complex or require an extra hustle, it can drive many of your prospective clients away.
In order to prevent that from happening, it is recommended to be open and transparent about all the steps one needs to take to cancel an order or service.
There are several ways to let your customers know what is required from them. You can add a section dedicated to cancellations to your FAQ page and send out an email with all the details on how to cancel an order. It is also a good idea to include your cancellation procedures at customer login page as well.
6. Offer points and rewards system
No matter what kind of business you are in, loyalty should always be rewarded.
Customers are more likely to return if you give them the incentive in a form of, for example, loyalty points for every purchase they make and extra points for leaving a review or recommending a friend.
You can do this easily on your website with a third party rewards app that tracks customer points in-person and online such as smile.io. Apps such as these typically come with nominal monthly fee that quickly provide a return on investment.
Another route, is creating your own custom app.
You may need to take out a small business loan to power the production of a custom app, but once it is up and running, you will be happy with the results. It will pay for itself with customers coming back time and again to rack up those points.
Even when you have to give them discounts in return for their points, you’re still winning by increasing customer loyalty further. On the same note, you can prepare special offers for new clients to attract more traffic to your store and expand your customer database.
The happier customers feel about their payment or billing process, the more likely it is that they are going to come back, make a purchase again or recommend your services to their friends. Your customer database will be growing and, consequently, you will see fewer abandoned carts.
The payment and billing options discussed here are some of the easiest and quickest ways to improve conversions on your site and you can start today.
