Payment transactions are a crucial part of business, and more and more organizations have started to compile payment data as a result. The effective use of payment analytics can assist many different types of businesses to gain insights into payment trends as well as revenue and costs.
Payment analytics tools offer a singular and consolidated look at the payment processes of a business and many platforms are simple enough to make use of that even the most basic of businesses can gain 24/7 access to online transaction data from anywhere.
The digitisation of payments and the resultant explosion in payment options for customers has also increased the number of opportunities for companies to gain greater insight into their customers.
These insights can then be put to good use by offering more personalised services that increase customer engagement, satisfaction and overall brand loyalty.
The uses of payment analytics
Payment analytics can be used by businesses for a number of different purposes, including providing cost insights, allowing for more efficient payments, spending pattern comparison across different units of the organisation, making cash management improvements and finding ways to reduce overall spending.
The ability to understand payment activity is one of the most important areas of customer relationship management, which payment analytics can be a tremendously useful tool for. Payment analytics allow businesses to be able to intersect invoicing, CRM and payments and perform an analysis of customer relationships with the use of transaction data.
This analysis can be as complicated as sending reminder messages to customers that have missed payments or as simple as a long-term customer payment overview.
How payment analytics relates to personalisation
Payment analytics can help the personalisation of services to customers by making it much easier for companies to understand their needs. Trying to work out what a customer really wants can be a very difficult task, and traditional research and the likes of focus groups can only go so far. Real personalisation of individual customers is a far trickier prospect, and payment analytics data can provide a real-time picture of a company’s customers as well as their purchases.
Payment analytics makes it much simpler for a company to be able to investigate its customer segments, gain a greater understanding of their behaviour, work out how best to keep them satisfied so they continue to come back for more.
Customer retention is often about ensuring that the right message is sent at the right time, which is where payment analytics can be of particular use.
Payment analytics can help an organisation to unearth lapsed customers who may be tempted back to making regular purchases with the right personalised offers or loyalty bonuses.
Once an organisation has gained a real understanding of the average value and frequency of a customer’s purchases, in addition to their preferred sales channel, the easier it becomes to work out what price point and what channel can be used to ensure they continue to shop with them.
Payment analytics is crucial to any business and can bring customer insights to help with personalisation and ensure the satisfaction and retention of regular customers.