As more companies adopt a data-driven approach to assess the health and next steps for their businesses, ISVs have the opportunity to make an impact by offering value-added services that support their customers’ goals.
One way ISVs can differentiate themselves is by convincing data-driven organizations that payments are a unique data source they can take advantage of.
How Payments Data Provides Value
Any time a consumer makes a payment through a card, mobile device, or digital wallet, data gets generated during the transaction. While this data is interesting by itself, it is ineffective on its own. When ISVs work with a trusted payments partner, they can get access to tools that help analyze transactions in aggregate. In turn, this provides useful customer insights for businesses.
Imagine what can be derived from transaction data such as the date and time of payment, amount per transaction, the location, the payment channel, and devices used to make a payment. When combined, businesses can see total visits, sales volume, and average tickets during specific times. From these insights, they can determine their busiest and slowest days of the week, in addition to their sales volumes for the morning, afternoon, and evening time segments.
Customer Data Gives Context
Advanced payments processors can collect customer information such as age, gender, income, education level, and the ZIP code where they reside. It can also break out this data based on new and returning customers.
Demographic data points are helpful for merchants who want to learn more about the clientele they are attracting. By seeing the breakdown of their customer types, merchants can develop personas and tailor their marketing and customer service messaging appropriately.
Customer location also matters. ZIP codes can help merchants make marketing decisions such as which neighborhoods they should focus their direct mail efforts on or which areas would make sense to open an additional location.
With Global Payments Integrated’s Analytics tool, ISVs can provide merchants with accurate snapshots of their sales performance and visitor profiles based on payment processing data, in turn, supporting a data-driven approach.
Gain Insights From User-Generated Reviews
Consumers are increasingly looking for and researching businesses and brands online before deciding to engage with their product or service. According to Oberlo, online reviews continue to hold weight, as nearly nine out of ten consumers read reviews before making a purchase. Three in four shoppers say they trust online reviews as much as personal recommendations.
Merchants need to know what customers are saying about them as well as how they are stacking up against their competitors. By reading all reviews, management can get a better understanding of what’s popular and what needs improvement both for their own business and regarding industry-wide trends. However, due to the sheer number of channels that customers can use to share their feedback and experiences, online reputation management can become overwhelming for businesses.
Software that offers to make this task easier can stand out from the competition. ISVs that work with Global Payments Integrated have the option to integrate with our Reputation Management tool, which shows customer comments across mainstream online review and social media sites.
By combining all comments into one platform, merchants can get an overall star rating for their business, giving them an “at-a-glance” view of what their customers think of them. They can also read reviews and respond directly to the customer without needing to separately sign in to the review or social media site.
The Reputation Management tool also provides side-by-side comparisons with competitors. While some may argue that comparison is the thief of joy, savvy merchants can use this intel to their advantage when strategizing for the future.
Putting Payments Data Into Action
Analyzing payments data through our Analytics and Reputation Management tool can assist in maintaining or creating a data-driven culture by:
- Measuring marketing effectiveness. Not only is this information useful for monitoring their business each day, but it can also be used to understand the impact of marketing campaigns and special events.
- Making fully informed decisions. By aggregating sales amounts and behavioral data all on one platform, management can find business insights efficiently and improve the decision-making process.
- Assisting with brand building. Our tool makes it easier to engage with visitors. Understanding demographics can also guide messaging across different customer profiles.
- Driving sales growth. Data-informed decision-making can help manage risks and maximize returns.
Global Payments Integrated is a payments partner that is ready to provide ISVs with the tools needed to leverage payment data to their advantage. Contact our sales team to learn how our value-added services can enhance your software and benefit your customers.