The Easy Way to Capture Voice of the Customer Data from Your Merchant Portfolio
You know moving forward without data to back up decisions is risky at best. Data-driven decision-making is essential for closing deals and successful upselling and cross-selling. It intelligently informs a company’s development roadmap, helps meet the market’s needs, and ultimately, leads to business growth. You may have even encouraged the companies in your merchant portfolio to use Voice of the Customer data to help them better understand customer needs, expectations, and product preferences. But what’s the best way for payment service providers to get these insights if the “Voice of your Customer” is actually the “Voice of the Merchant”?
Many payment service providers face the challenge of collecting, aggregating, and analyzing merchant feedback to benefit from decision-making. However, digitizing and automating data collection processes with a merchant engagement platform will give you all the advantages of using this data without investing in time-consuming processes and disrupting merchants’ workflows.
Start with the Basics About Your Merchant Portfolio
Step one in collecting Voice of the Merchant data is understanding exactly who your merchants are. Your reps collect some information and merchant feedback during onboarding, and your technical team has at least a basic understanding of the type of smart payment device the merchant uses. This information can help you segment your merchant portfolio into broad categories for future sales and marketing campaigns. However, more details will help you build a stronger, longer-lasting relationship with merchants.
A merchant engagement platform allows you to interact directly with key-holding associates who manage store locations, bear the responsibility for payment experiences, and heavily influence purchasing decisions. With an innovative merchant engagement platform, you can welcome these users, keep them informed, and educate them. You can also gauge their satisfaction with the tools and services they currently use and pave the way to upselling and cross-selling success.
Ask for Direct Merchant Feedback
Surveys have historically been a go-to way to collect Voice of the Customer data. However, payment service providers, particularly those with hundreds or thousands of accounts, know conducting surveys can take time, and merchants may not respond if they need to scroll through several screens. A smarter approach is to leverage smart payment devices and digital workflows to collect feedback. Short merchant surveys right on the payment device at startup that ask just a question or two will get a better response than asking for longer evaluations. With the right engagement platform, you can also segment your merchant portfolio and ask relevant questions, such as:
- What is their level of satisfaction with vertical-specific services or solutions?
- Was the compliance workflow that you provided easy to follow, and did it meet their needs?
- Are they satisfied with their payment solution deployment experience or new applications?
- Would they be interested in a new product or service designed for their market?
You can also ask simple customer satisfaction or Net Promoter Score questions to gauge overall satisfaction with your solutions and services. This merchant feedback can help you identify at-risk accounts so that you can intervene and keep your churn rate low.
Analyze Data from Merchant Engagement
What merchants say or the ratings they provide in a survey are valuable, but even more valuable is tracking the actions they take. When you use an innovative engagement platform, you can monitor which segments of your merchant portfolio use particular payment methods, respond to certain upselling and cross-selling offers, and how often they use the tools they deploy.
A merchant engagement platform designed for payment service providers takes merchants through guided workflows that notify them of products that can help them enhance payment experiences. It also allows you to track which offers get the best response. This data will help you build profiles of different merchant segments, which can help your team sell, upsell, and cross-sell more effectively.
Also, keep in mind that merchant behaviors will change over time. Collecting and analyzing periodically will help you keep your finger on the pulse of your market and engage your merchant portfolio more effectively.
Know What You Don’t Know
To build a thriving portfolio, you should encourage merchants to make data-driven decisions that help them operate more competitively and profitably. It’s also smart to lead by example, actively learning what your merchant portfolio wants and letting that insight inform your decision-making. Merchants will appreciate that you listen and respond to their needs and wants, and you’ll see more upsells and cross-sells as a result.
If you attempt to collect this data manually, it would take a significant amount of time and effort that you could devote to new opportunities. But there’s a better way. POPcodes’ D2M™ platform allows you to automate the process. With D2M™, you can collect feedback with merchant surveys and graphical workflows. You can then analyze data from the platform to understand the services and tools that resonate with various market segments.
Becoming a true payments partner means listening and responding to the Voice of the Customer, which for payment service providers is the “Voice of the Merchant.” Get the insights you need to be a valuable partner with D2M™. Contact us to learn more.