The success of any business depends on the efficiency of its payment process and collections. For many businesses, their payment operation processes are broken. For others, they are non-existent as they depend on manual processes that take time and are difficult to scale.
At the point of payment, many things can go wrong. For subscription businesses, card errors can make payments fail, for fintech, insufficient funds and expired cards can stall repayments, and for e-commerce businesses, cart abandonments and limited payment options can reduce purchases.
If you run any of these kinds of businesses and don’t take charge of these things, it can lead to customer churn and loss of revenue. From failed payments, cart abandonments, poor payment experiences, lack of revenue recognition, and reconciliation, the complexity of these processes increases as a business grows and scales.
In this article, I’ll highlight some complexities businesses face and have to deal with as it pertains to payment processing. And, show you how you can supercharge your payment operations, increase your customer lifetime value and grow revenue. For subscription, e-commerce, fintech, and digital businesses.
Complexities Businesses Have to Deal With
Every life cycle of a business has its peculiar challenges but when there’s friction with the payment process, the impact tells greatly on the business’s revenue growth. Here are some payment challenges businesses encounter.
1. Recovering failed payments when they occur
Subscription business models cannot afford to ignore payment failures as it leads to involuntary churn and loss of revenue. Research by PYMNTS shows proof that a 50% share of customer churn in subscription-based businesses is an involuntary churn caused by failed payments.
For fintech businesses like buy now pay later, failure to recover loans given can lead to higher non-performing loans and this is a result of insufficient funds, card issues and poor customer engagement flows.
2. Multiple payment methods integrations and currencies
Customers will always have a preferred payment method and many customers drop off at the point of payment when they cannot find their preferred payment option or currency they want to pay with. This poses a challenge for growing businesses as they have to deal with integrating multiple payment options at checkout for their customers.
3. Automatic revenue recognition and reconciliation
For a lot of businesses, the process of receiving payments remains largely manual, expensive, and highly inefficient. Invoices are also not standardized and they are typically issued and received manually. This process increases the administrative burden of the business, takes a long time to recognise and reconcile revenue, and for the most part, opens the business up to fraud. These inefficiencies can cost a business time, resources, and customers. This is especially true in the FMCG sector where payments are largely cash-based.
4. Financial data analysis and taking actions based on payment data
With the vast amount of payment data created daily, businesses face a huge challenge of sifting through all the data sets to draw valuable insights and inform business decisions. Besides the possibility of messy data due to the high volume, they also face other challenges such as collecting meaningful data, selecting the right analytics tool to analyze and visualize those data from multiple sources, and low-quality data. This can be a hassle for finance and business teams.
5. Customer segmentation and payment event outreach
Businesses find it difficult to automatically segment their customers and reach out to them when certain payment events (charge failure, cart abandonment, invoice payment failure, subscription renewal or card expiry notification, etc.) occur or offer them discount deals or priority access based on their spend history. Most businesses cater to both low-paying customers and high-paying customers in the same way. This leads to unrealized revenue as the spend potential for customers are not maximized.
Addressing these challenges requires a comprehensive payment operations strategy and workflow that leverages a combination of payment orchestration, failed payment recovery, metrics, revenue management, and reconciliation tools. So businesses can leverage a unified payment infrastructure that simplifies automation workflows, smart invoicing and instant reconciliation processes, data-driven customer engagement and reduces the risk of failed payments.
Our payment automation and revenue management tool is suited to solve these challenges.
Bunce – A better way to optimize payment operations, increase customer lifetime value, and grow revenue, for recurring and one-time payments.
What You Can Do With Bunce
We built Bunce to help you automate your payment workflows easily, reduce manual tasks and redirect your team’s focus to other important tasks. Discover things you can do with Bunce.
1. Payment event automation
Payment events are defined actions your business can take when a transaction occurs or is about to happen. Once they are set, these events are automated. From how to handle a customer’s card that is about to expire, expired or got declined at the point of paying so you don’t lose such customers or revenue, for subscription businesses, how they can efficiently nudge their customers to go from a free trial to a paid plan, managing chargebacks and all the process in the payment lifecycle.
2. Automatic invoice reconciliation
A lot of businesses are still involved with paper-based and offline payments which is a major pain point at scale, resulting in reconciliation issues, also the possibility of fraud. Bunce simplifies invoice generation and automatically recognizes and reconciles invoice payments across your accounting platforms from the likes of Zoho Books, Microsoft Dynamics 365, Sage, and more.
3. Payment Orchestration
Multiple digital payment methods give rise to fragmentation, and these give rise to challenges for both merchants and customers. Customers either wonder if a merchant supports their preferred payment methods or, at the point of checkout, will love to choose how they can pay the merchant,
For the merchants, this results in an integration nightmare (building and maintaining the integrations and it takes time to get to market) as they have to integrate multiple payment methods beyond just cards like cryptocurrency, direct debits, wallets, virtual accounts, and more to avoid losing customers.
With Bunce, integration is fast and easy. With a single API or our no-code tool, merchants can access multiple payment providers and add new payment methods to products in less than 5 minutes.
4. Metrics and data analysis
From a single dashboard, see all valuable metrics based on your business type across all your payment providers or accounts and get actionable insights on it.
5. Customer engagement
Bunce gives your business the ability to message customers across multiple communication channels. This is based on various payment events and data to personalize and manage your customer relationship better and increase your customer lifetime value.
What Value Does Bunce Offer to Businesses?
- Automate all your payment events and processes and make it easy for your team to engage customers based on payment events. From how to handle insufficient funds, a customer’s expired card, or payment decline so you don’t lose customers or revenue. Automatically engage customers through various channels when a payment fails and help them complete their payments. Automatically nudge your customers to go from a free trial to a paid plan, manage chargebacks, and offer partial payment options and reconciliations.
- Automate back office processes of generating and processing invoices. Bunce works seamlessly with all major accounting and ERP platforms, and payment processes are automatically synced with your accounting and ERP software in real-time.
- Extensive reporting and revenue analytics: By integrating your payment provider and accounts, Bunce analyzes your payment data and presents a simplified dashboard of metrics. These insights are based on your payment data to enable you to make smart and actionable business decisions.
- Improved payment experience: Create checkout links, buttons, pages and embeddable widgets to receive payments from anywhere. Take charge of the payment flow processes by offering customers their preferred payment methods at checkout, route payments to providers that are more likely to complete transactions, and set discounts based on products, location, or customer segments.
- Automatically segment all your customers based on different payment events and conditions and engage them to improve their lifetime value.
Our focus is to become the preferred solution to enable our customers 10x their revenue and become more profitable businesses.
If you are looking to grow and scale your revenue, better manage your payment processes and increase customer lifetime value, then you should try Bunce today.
Get started with a 30-day free trial with no credit card required, in just 5 minutes. And if you need any help, we have account managers on standby to answer any questions you may have, give you tips, and make sure you have a great experience.
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Cheers, to powering your revenue growth.
Paul Ayuk.