Ai Editorial: Be it for books or airline tickets, mobile shoppers don’t differentiate!

First Published on 6th March, 2019

Ai Editorial: Pragmatic ways are emerging to cut down on drop-offs in the mobile booking funnel, and these aren’t just restricted to mobile design and UX.

 

How to ensure a fraction of a second isn’t wasted in delivering a sublime CX? How authentication of a shopper’s identity is being improved upon, and in the process ensuring that a user of a mobile device doesn’t end up being annoyed? How tokenization offering is being enhanced? How prudent is “guest checkout”?

These and other questions are being evaluated considering new features that are simplifying mobile shopping.

“Customers today want to pay how they want, where they want and they want it to be seamless and they are not willing to wait. In online payments it doesn’t matter if you are selling books or airline tickets – we are all in business of removing friction because in digital era, it is speed that sells,” said Vojin Rakonjac, Head of Payment Solutions, Voyego.

In addition to experimentation and testing that eventually shapes up the payment experience, including the check-out phase, there are other areas that are being focused upon:

  1. Combination of tokenization and cloud: Tokenization facilitates new payment capabilities and enables to adapt quickly to changing market requirements.  Another important aspect is protecting sensitive payment card data. To enhance the tokenization offering, specialists are looking at cloud support, and the plan is to accelerate the checkout phase and augment the payment experience. Retailers are going deep and assessing the utility of various cloud offerings. For instance, infrastructure-as-a-service might be for a e-commerce site, whereas platform-as-a-service layer on services such as threat detection.
  1. Assessing emotional factors during shopping: Irritation is being linked to site navigation, one way in which fear surfaces and increases tends to be related to the transaction size, plus there are security fears. And then there are trust issues, too. Shoppers avoid using a payment method even if it is secure if they feel that the company is not wholly to be trusted, according to Klarna. As for coming up with emotionally intelligent online strategies, Klarna recommends nurturing of m-shopping habits, embedding ‘one touch pause’ functionality into online shopping experience to allow consumers to return to same place, incorporating payment choice by offering alternative options such as deferred payments, ensuring the checkout page isn’t different from the rest of the site/ app experience etc.
  1. Payment options and behind-the-scenes transaction routing: There is a need to evaluate whether the new technology (or any payment method) would result in additional value for the customer as well as the merchant. It is the customer who decides how they wish to pay. Airlines need to design the integrated payment flow across payment options across channels and languages; implement integrated payment transaction and settlement reporting, gear up for multi-currency processing and conversion and opt for payment controls according to the difference of processing by payment types etc. In case of KLM, as reported by Ai, rather than having a payment functionality in each and every front-end, it was decided to set up an independent payment platform or a payment engine. It is connected to “internal” customers/ front-end for payments.
  1. Adhering to regulatory requirements: The payment ecosystem continues to evolve, and one of the driving factors behind the same are the regulatory moves focused on streamlining digital payments. A development that is being closely followed is the PSD2 in Europe. It introduces strict security requirements for the initiation and processing of electronic payments. One mandatory aspect is to apply so-called strong customer authentication (SCA) when a payer initiates an electronic payment transaction. This would directly impact customer experience (CX) and fraud management. The main consequence for retailers would be around the regulatory changes to reduce fraud that will have a direct impact to the CX. Where SCA is required, biometrics is expected to play a big role, considering availability of features such as fingerprint sensors, voice or facial recognition on smartphones. 
  1. Curbing fraud: Merchants, along with payments specialists, are trying to capitalize on the evolution of the consumer technology to simplify authentication. One such move is enabling banks to count on biometric authentication into their respective apps so that users can avail their connected device and use their fingerprint, their voice their face to finish a transaction. The industry is also weighing ongoing improvements, for instance, EMV 3-D Secure Specifications, for a real-time, secure, information-sharing pipeline to authenticate buyers without adding any friction in the buying process.

 

Hear from senior executives about digital payments at the upcoming ATPS (21st Century Customer Experience for Payments & Fraud - Airline & Travel Payments Summit) to be held in London (Brighton), UK  (7-9 May, 2019).

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