Most modern businesses understand how important data analytics can be in determining the quality and success of their business decisions. However, the benefits of payment analytics specifically, are lesser known.
Whether it be in relation daily frontline choices made by financiers, marketers and operations specialists or weighty, high-level strategies determined by upper management – payment data, if harnessed effectively, can have a considerable impact on business operations and as a result, company productivity, efficiency and ultimately, profitability.
But what exactly are Payment Analytics and how do you use them effectively to make better decisions?
Payment Analytics
Payment Analytics refers to the habitual practice of collecting, and analysing your company’s aggregate payments data (including credit cards, cheques, debit cards, wire transfers etc.), to gain valuable business insights and drive key decisions.
While there are tools, services and software that have been designed specifically for this purpose, you can also put in place manual processes to ensure you are getting the most out of your payment data.
Making More Strategic Decisions
With the help of analytics tools or without, by diving into your payment data consistently and identifying key patterns where they emerge you can optimize your business business decisions and operations. Here are a few ways examples of ways you can effectively harness payments data:
1. Personalise The Customer Experience And Increase Satisfaction
by consolidating and evaluating your organization’s invoicing, payments and CRM data alongside each other, you can gather important insights into customer patterns and behaviour that enable you to make decisions that boost customer satisfaction. For example, you could use data surrounding an individual’s preferred payment method to quicken, personalise and enhance the transaction experience. Studies reveal that small choices like this can help to significantly strengthen existing customer relationships and enhance brand loyalty.
2. Improve Payment Efficiency
by constantly reviewing your company’s payment activity, you can not only personalise and improve the transaction process, but you can also improve the overall efficiency of your payment processes. For example, if your payments environment is consistently surveyed and monitored, you have full visibility over and will be alerted to any issues that arise — unpaid invoices, unsuccessful payments, time lags — and can consequently make quick, efficient decisions to deal with them as soon as they occur. What’s more, if you are using an intelligent payment analytics solution, you can predict and prevent errors before they even arise. In this sense, payment analytics can help you to make much better decisions to optimize your transactional processes.
3. Streamline Commercial Operations
By diligently reviewing your historical and real-time payment data, and picking out key patterns, you can find the vital information you need to make strategic choices surrounding commercial operations. For example, you might discover that a large percentage of transactions are made around a certain time/day of the week. Armoured with this knowledge, you might decide to tweak an aspect of your operations around this observation, to make commercial operations smoother and increase customer satisfaction.
The Right Tools For Success
Payment analytics offer organisations a minefield of valuable insights which, if leveraged in a strategic way, can be used to improve the quality of your business decisions and in doing so, increase customer satisfaction, reduce costs, elevate profitability and so much more.
If you are yet to invest in a quality payment analytics solution that enables you to optimize your payment’s environment, providing real-time visibility, deep analytics and rapid troubleshooting – there has never been a more important time to do so than now!
