Electronic Retailer - August 2012 - 45

BY JENN MUNSON

Making Your Payments Program Shine
CHANNEL CROSSING: PAYMENT PROCESSING
Nothing says more about a customer than a payment. A customer’s preferred method of payment, payment history and simply the act of purchasing say more about that customer than all of the demographic data you could gather. And where does this information sit? It should fall within your organization’s payments program. Yet, many merchants still operate without a team or program in place that actually analyzes and monitors payments beyond the sale authorization. Let’s explore why every company needs a payments team (or provider-partner that acts as such), why payments should be the central hub of your business, and how you can gain strategic partners in your own organization to help make your payments program shine. cards to make purchases on installment billing products. With this information in hand you would work with your marketing department to incentivize certain payment types in that region and work with your customer service department to ask what type of payment the customer is using. Polishing Your Program Exercise 2: Think about your specific business – when was the last time you communicated important issues to key groups within your organization using payments data? What additional departments should be introduced to payments?

Managing Your Payments Message to Different Teams
Before you can begin communicating and working with other departments, you should have a clear understanding of what matters to each business unit of your organization. The payments world has its own language. Representment, pre-arbitration, interchange and PCI likely don’t mean much outside of the payments team. In order to forge successful relationships inside your organization, you need to translate your message in a way each group will appreciate and enjoy. For example, your finance department may not want to look at a well-designed PowerPoint depicting how you can derive customer lifetime value from your payments data. Instead, try sending them something they’re used to, like an Excel document, clearly depicting transparent pricing and interchange costs. (Go ahead and send that flashy PowerPoint to marketing – they’ll love it.) Are you seeing a direct correlation with chargebacks and customer call center wait times? Work with your customer service department to determine how the call center can become more efficient. Polishing Your Program Exercise 3: List four strategic partners within your company. What is the partner “personality” and communication preference? What information or data is this partner going to find most valuable?

Why Does Every Company Need a Payments Team?
Consider the canary in a coal mine analogy. If you’re not familiar with it, canaries were once used in coal mines to detect any serious gas build ups – as they are especially sensitive to methane and carbon monoxide. As long as the bird continued singing, miners new they were safe. A dead canary signaled immediate evacuation. Today, the phrase is often used to serve as a warning to others. So, how does the canary in a coal mine analogy apply to payments? Your awareness of payments data will help you identify potential problems and opportunities for your bottom line, your top line, your business – quickly. Polishing Your Program Exercise 1: Think about your business and how payments data can help identify potential operational concerns. What key metrics or indicators should you be aware of? Do you currently have some sort of reporting or tracking in place to monitor potential issues?

Payments as the Central Hub of Your Business
Customer service. Security. Marketing. Accounting. Can you imagine your business without these critical teams? I’d venture to guess your answer is no. But there is another team that should join this list: the payments team. In fact, a well-run payments team should be a central business hub, interacting and supporting multiple departments. There are likely departments in your organization that could benefit from payments data (if they’re not already), but in what way? One of the most important factors to the success of your program is having a good understanding of what departments would benefit from the customer intelligence data you have at your fingertips in the form of payments. Properly leveraging this data would mean you had payments intelligence data showing that the majority of consumers in a particular region were using non-reloadable prepaid

Why Would You Not Leverage Your Payments Knowledge?
In a world of big data, the bigger story is identifying consumer data you have available and leveraging it across departments. Increasing company awareness about payments can help your business decrease costs, retain more customers, reduce the impact of losses from fraud and reinvigorate revenue lines. Go ahead and let your payments program shine. Jenn Munson is customer experience manager at Litle & Co. and brings more than 10 years of payment management experience to the team. In addition, Jenn serves on the Board of Directors for the DRF as education chair. 45

August 2012 | electronicRETAILER

Electronic Retailer - August 2012

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