Customization isn’t just a trend; it’s the future of digital payments.
Personalization fuels loyalty in the digital payment age, and turning transactions into tailored experiences is helping firms move beyond one-size-fits-all approaches to end-user stickiness and retention.
“If you think about physical experiences and interactions, whether it’s in a commerce setting or others, they’re always tailored and personalized,” Jason Knell, senior director of commerce services GTM and content partnerships at Adobe, told PYMNTS during a conversation for the series “What’s Next in Payments.”
“We’re really keen to make sure that as we move to the digital world, that same tailored and personalized approach follows,” Knell added.
However, achieving personalization at scale is no small feat. After all, if it were easy, everyone would be doing it.
Before firms can tap personalization in the payments landscape to redefine the way they engage with their customers, they need advanced technology and a vast amount of data to draw from.
Knell explained that when considering tailoring a potential combination of product, asset, language and customer audience, “things can quickly get exponential.”
“The explosion of personalization at scale is really driving a need for not just the stack of technology, but a crazy amount of content that we see feeding that personalization,” he added.
Data plays a vital role in the personalization journey, and accurate data that reflects the real customer experience is crucial to creating exceptional digital experiences.
“The first thing is making sure you’re instrumented properly to understand what’s happening on your digital experiences, and once you’ve got a handle on what’s actually happening with your existing customers, then you can take the next step,” Knell said.
The challenge in today’s heterogeneous and increasingly omnichannel world, where businesses use various vendors and partners, and consumers transact and interact across various platforms, is finding a unified platform to collect data from disparate sources in such a way that it is possible to take action on that data.
“Getting the data flowing between systems can be really hard,” he said. “We often hear from merchants and customers, ‘I want to do this, but I’m not quite there yet.’”
When it comes to personalization, the payment experience is a crucial component. It’s often referred to as the “moment of truth” in the customer journey and can help unlock greater lifetime value, Knell said.
Adobe collaborates with payment providers like PayPal and Braintree to offer personalized payment solutions. It has also introduced its own payment services solution, built on PayPal’s payment rails, to simplify and enhance the payment experience.
“[It] really powers customization and personalization for our merchants,” Knell said. “It’s much easier for them to turn things on or off, customize the look and feel, and enable the right experience for the right customers, whether it is turning on certain payment methods or customizing the order of payment options in the stack.”
“You have to make sure you are delivering the right thing at the right time,” he added.
Payment personalization must also take into account the need to combat fraud and ensure that personalized experiences are fulfilled through secure transactions.
“You spend all this effort upfront to acquire customers and bring them into this great experience on the top of the funnel,” he said. “It is crucial to follow that through to completion by ensuring that they are who they say they are.
As businesses continue striving to deliver tailored, personalized experiences to their customers across various digital touchpoints, further technical innovations will play an ever-increasing role in shaping these experiences, ultimately redefining the way we engage with payments in the digital age.
