To Get Ahead in 2023, Put Customer Experience First

The best way to keep customers engaged is to ensure an effortless experience, Prove Co-founder and CEO Rodger Desai writes in the new PYMNTS eBook, “What’s Your Plan? Payments Strategies for a Strong 2022 Finish.”

For payments providers, it’s all about the customer experience — specifically, removing friction to facilitate seamless transactions. We live in a world where the average consumer expects speed-to-purchase — whether it’s retail, banking, gaming, subscriptions or any digital service that requires payment. The best way to keep customers engaged is to ensure that the experience is so effortless that they never even think about the back-end technology that is facilitating it. That seamless brand experience should be extended from the first touchpoint (website, physical location, social media ad, etc.) right through to payment.  

Here are a few ways to prioritize customer experience as we close out 2022:

Kill the password: Prove recently conducted a survey of 2,000 Americans, and unsurprisingly found that U.S. consumers are fed up with passwords and identity verification processes. The survey found 83% are frustrated with the complexity of creating new online accounts, and 60% would abandon account opening if identity verification takes more than 40 seconds. It’s clear that consumers flock to businesses that respect their time and keep them secure without hassle. In our view, the winners in the digital economy will be those that kill the password — and focus on making digital journeys easy, secure and private.

Enable users to sign up for retail loyalty and membership programs in seconds: Online retailers are uplifting revenue by establishing either a loyalty or membership program. While the benefits of such programs are clear, converting a first-time customer into a loyal member is no easy task because it requires the customer to provide extra information (email, shipping address, name, DOB, etc.) at checkout. Form pre-fill and cryptographic authentication tools can remove friction by auto-populating forms with the customer’s information from verified data sources so that all a customer needs to do is review and confirm the info. This new flow can reduce the number of keystrokes required to fill out a form by around 80%, increasing loyalty member acquisition.

Fight fraud: The increasing popularity of eCommerce has posed another major challenge to merchants: the surge in card-not-present (CNP) fraud where transactions are remote payments that are made without swiping, inserting, or tapping a debit or credit card on a physical payment terminal. These transactions are much more vulnerable to identity theft and spoofing than card swipes or EMV near-field payments. Studies show that fraud is 81% more likely to occur during a CNP scenario than at a point-of-sale machine. Fortunately, even merchants without robust fraud teams can leverage digital identity solutions to prevent fraud. Using advanced digital identity solutions, merchants can benefit from powerful behavioral and phone-centric identity signals at the time of a potential transaction to mitigate fraud such as SIM swaps and other account takeover schemes. It’s a powerful and nearly frictionless way to verify the identity of customers.

Businesses that prioritize the digital consumer experience and modernize their acquisition, transaction and engagement journeys while controlling for fraud will capture market share in 2023, as consumers flock to and remain loyal to businesses that respect their time and security. In a digital world, phones are by far the most secure, accurate, and frictionless way to prove identity, and Prove’s authentication technology will continue to be a key tool in making digital journeys far better.