Own the End-to-end Customer Experience

In payments, cardholder experience and engagement is more important than ever. The high expectations and limited patience of today’s consumers mean that if an experience is not relevant or meaningful, or if it creates too much friction, the customer can simply move on to a better choice.

Financial institutions understand this, and they also know their card programs need to offer solutions that go beyond the status quo of “me too” products to engage their customers with top of wallet solutions that differentiate their brand.

Engagement is a key strategy for FIs, card issuers, and other organizations ranging from post offices to airlines to differentiate their brand and offer personalized experiences at scale. In payments, engagement relates to a consumer experience that goes beyond a transaction.

Issuers who successfully drive engagement enjoy numerous benefits, including deeper loyalty, improved frequency and relevancy of valued interactions, increased usage, and most importantly, higher revenue.

Build contextual and relevant credit card customer lifecycle & user experiences before, during and after a purchase

Successful engagement occurs when communication is valued, meaningful, timely, and prompts interaction. This happens when information is relevant and personalized to a cardholder’s individual situation, and is delivered in the right format over the right channel at just the right time.

Delivering this kind of high-value engagement experience before, during, and after a purchase requires a modern payments processing technology. i2c’s Agile Processing platform’s Campaign Manager module enables management of integrated promotional and operational cardholder engagement and communications features from a single location.

Here are use case examples of each:

• Promotional Engagement: Based on contextual information such as purchase history and geo-location, a consumer receives a digital coupon offer on his smartphone while shopping at his favorite retail outlet. He decides to take advantage of the coupon, and the discount is automatically applied to his loyalty and rewards card at checkout. Real-time digital commerce is neatly blended into his shopping experience, enabling a natural extension of integrated loyalty and rewards.
• Operational Engagement: A frustrated cardholder calls the credit card issuer’s service center to report a problem. After a lengthy phone call finally resolves the issue, the customer service representative offers the upset customer a credit for a free coffee as thanks for his patience. The offer is added to the cardholder’s account, and he immediately receives a notification on his smartphone for the free coffee that can be automatically redeemed during checkout at his favorite café without the cardholder having to do anything. This changes the engagement from a negative to a positive.

As demonstrated above, engagement is no longer just about issuers pushing out marketing messages. It can also reduce risks and costs, particularly when it comes to customer servicing and support after the transaction.

By maximizing engagement with timely, relevant, and actionable information across the customer and payment processing lifecycle, credit card issuers can benefit from the additional revenue, improved customer satisfaction, and increased usage that comes with top of wallet status.