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Business

Posted By Jessica Weisman-Pitts

Posted on April 22, 2022

Why UX Design Is Key to Making Merchants Unique in 2022

Led by its fresh approach to design and user experience, Mike ShafroFounder & CEO of xpate, looks at how the future of customer experience in fintech platforms will shape merchant growth in 2022 and beyond.

In 2022, improving the customer experience will be the defining growth strategy for any online business, especially in the cross-border ecommerce space, where sales are set to hit $1.2 trillion.

The digital ecommerce world is borderless – but it’s also becoming more crowded, and competition is getting brutal. With payment technology evolving so quickly, customers are more demanding than ever. They expect their merchants to offer quick and easy payment journeys, but having a fast checkout process involves so much more behind the scenes.

Forget trying to undercut rival’s prices, or building the biggest product range. Now you’ve got your customer’s attention, are you motivating them to hit the pay button? Customers want great experiences, and the business that can exceed their expectations will keep them coming back for more.

Business owners are understandably focused on expanding, and think of UX design as an afterthought, as something that can be tweaked when they get around to it. The simple fact is that investing in better UX as soon as possible pays off massive dividends in the long term, in the form of faster customer onboarding, and enjoyable experiences that deepen loyalty.

In a complex digital world where customers need simplicity, by making UX a strategic priority, businesses become unique.

Understanding how UX and customer journeys interact

If your product or service depends on a smooth digital journey, you need to know how your customers find you, how they move through your website, and what will incentivise them to complete transactions. Those UX/CX insights give you a goldmine of data that you can use to strengthen your business and smash your customers’ expectations in the best way.

User acquisition is just the start of the customer journey. It’s easy to think of the terms UX and customer payment journey as being the same thing. But there are distinctions which are vital to understand. UX is the roadmap of interactions between a customer and a merchant portal or interface – for instance, the steps they take to log in or browse products or move through the site.

It’s those interactions which determine the success of the customer payment journey, helping the merchant to track how their customers behave at the checkout, and how they make payments.

Armed with that data, the merchant can fine-tune all their checkout elements to make the customer journey much quicker and smoother. That could be adding more payment methods that customers in certain countries are known to prefer – Interac online transfers in Canada, or iDEAL in the Netherlands for example. Or it could be enabling prices to be displayed in more languages and currencies.

Simple tweaks like these seem obvious, but when time-pressed merchants are busy trying to serve customers, details like these are easy to overlook.

Exceptional user design creates unforgettable customer experiences

How do you deliver an exceptional customer experience? You need to cast a critical eye over your online presence. Nobody in their right mind sets out to make things difficult for customers. But it’s easy for busy merchants to get caught up in the hustle and bustle of their daily operations and forget to pay attention to the small details in their online site, app or checkout.

Or they may mistakenly think that packing loads of clickable icons, images and banners into their site is the way to attract new custom. What customers want is simplicity. They want to quickly find what they’re looking for and pay for it with as little friction as possible.

Put yourself in the virtual shoes of a new customer who’s clicked on your site for the first time. What do they see, and how easy is it for them to find what they’re looking for? And in a world that’s being increasingly shaped by cross-border ecommerce, can they send or receive international payments easily, quickly and securely?

Merchants become so frantically focused on selling that they forget a crucial principle. Don’t complicate things. Make your messages simple. Help your customers get from start to finish in the shortest time possible. Focusing on serving, not selling.

Human or helpbot? Offer expert customer support in the way customers want

Virtual assistants, chatbots, digital concierges, natural language processing…whatever terms they go by, we all know that automation and artificial intelligence are transforming customer support functionality with intuitive responses to common customer queries. And they’re increasingly becoming a fundamental part of UX and CX design. Use of this technology is set to grow from $10.72 billion in 2020 to $48.46 billion by 2026.

A growing number of customers love using these innovative functions, but merchants need to remember that many people prefer to be helped by another human. Merchants themselves sometimes need to have their hands held and guided through confusing processes.

Customers value businesses that take the time to listen to them and respond with relevant actions. With a responsive, can-do attitude backed by expert knowledgeable advice, businesses can create an emotional connection by anticipating and satisfying their customers’ needs.

Building these customer-focused experiences can be costly and complicated for merchants which don’t have the in-house skills or resources. It’s a daunting task for small businesses who just want to get on with selling and growing. That’s why partnering with a specialist who lives and breathes fintech-focused UX design is the simplest and quickest way bring your site to life and deliver an unforgettable customer experience.

The UX-led approach will elevate businesses above the competition

At xpate, we want to embed simple and effective UX design in every aspect of cross-border ecommerce. That includes our own platform and website, which was refreshed just two short years after the business started, to align the look and feel with how customers most often interacted with it.

We did that by measuring the amount of conversions, page view depth, retention and button clicks to enhance the way we showcase our products. Our redesign allowed us to significantly increase the amount of page views, and conversions skyrocketed by 90%.

We’re taking this UX-led approach into our product solutions too. Stacks is our drag-and-drop open banking based payment and budgeting solution, and we’ve designed the interface to be easy enough even for a child to use it. All you need is literally at your fingertips. Customers can see, save and quickly organise all of their assets in one place using just their finger, which helps them to visualise how their money is moving.

As the world gets more digital, UX and customer journeys will be the foundations for future growth. Getting these elements optimised – and keeping a keen eye on them to anticipate changing customer demands – will be the springboard for continued success.

In 2022, what will set businesses apart from the competition is when their payment processes are so speedy and simple that their customers forget what it’s like to wait.

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