merchants just wanna have a good service

Personal Touch, Quick Communication, Great Customer Service

When it comes to payment services, there are two things small and medium enterprises will put before everything else: simple onboarding and simple and easy-to-use payment services. Merchants want their MSPs to work 24/7, without pauses or outages - and when there are hitches, they want customer support to be fast, timely and efficient.

Time is Money

A 24/7 service is what any SME would probably place at the top of their wish list. For any SME offering their goods and services to a global market, the ability to complete a transaction and receive an instant confirmation of payment, be it from the US, Hungary or Japan, at any given time of day, is crucial.

But it's not only payment services that SMEs want available at all times: customer service is equally important. When a problem occurs, and they inevitably do, SMEs want to interact with a living person who can understand the nuances of their problem and offer them a tailored solution instead of pressing buttons for an automated service.

Read the whole study here: https://bit.ly/2XhJQVb

Personalization Means Caring

A personalized customer service would be even better: SMEs want to feel they are being treated just like a person would be, instead of being viewed by their provider as just another company. That personal touch can go a long way, and it only requires a database from which the customer service operator can have data at their disposal about the SME, the previous problems and issues they encountered and any notes that might help with dealing with future ones. And SMEs also want to have said problem solved now instead of waiting for Monday because the customer service doesn't work weekends.

Data, Data, and More Data

Knowing your customers is always a good strategy and with digital wallets and mobile payments, there is a treasure trove of customer information that SMEs can benefit from. Accessed in real time, shopping preferences and history of purchases can inform both marketing decisions and the development of new offers, allowing SMEs to keep in line with their customers' changing needs, desires and much more.

In fact, the adoption of mobile should at this point be a matter of not "if". It should rather be a question of "when" or perhaps even "why haven't you already". Worldpay's 2018 Global Payment Report has predicted that by 2022 mobile payments will become the second most common payment method, placing themselves firmly ahead of cash and vying for the top position with debit cards.

No Such Things as Secure Enough

Security is also ahead the list of good services. SMEs want it for themselves and for their customers, but just as they want a good security solution, they also want to have said solution explained to them by its provider, in simple and understandable terms that they are likely to be able to repeat them clearly to their own customers.

Knowing what exactly the security solution protects them from and how it does so builds trust both between an SME and the payment provider but also between an SME and its customers.

Integration is the Game

All in all, a good, fast and simple service is what SMEs crave, both in setting up a payments system, be it a cash registry or an online shop, and in all facets of payments execution.

It is this simplicity that removes friction and consequently ensures end-customer satisfaction and success for the merchant.

For example, Uber recently decided to acquire a payments processing license from the Dutch Central Bank in preparations for setting up their own payments division. While time will tell what exactly their intentions are, experts are betting on one (or perhaps a combination of) the following two possibilities: either Uber wants to perform direct payouts to their drivers, or the company has decided to do away with their payments middlemen and wishes to increase their control over the payments value chain.

Uber is just the last in a line of enterprises, big and small, who have taken that step from selling a product or a service to also providing their customers with a means of paying for said offerings. Some have also already taken this step, and many others are considering it.

It all comes down to this: faced with the growing customer demands of a smooth, frictionless experience, small and medium enterprises have the option of either curating the features offered to them by multiple payment service providers, thereby creating a bundle of services that need to be well selected in order to avoid friction as well as provide good security.