In the world of payments, we are always looking for new ways to automate and increase efficiency. Furthermore, customers have increasingly higher expectations for payments to become a seamless and effortless process. Due to this, as well as the comfort of stable revenue, we are seeing a shift towards recurring and subscription business models. They increase stability for businesses and reduce the effort required from their customers. But, for these business models, how can a tool like Account Updater help to increase conversions and lower your bottom line?
Depending on the business, approximately 5% of payments may be rejected due to cards being expired, lost or stolen. Typically, after one of these transactions is rejected, businesses will have to call up their customer to request an alternative payment method. What account updater does, is eliminate much of the need to do this by automatically updating card details.
Reaching out to customers is a costly process. It takes up your team’s time, which could be used for more productive endeavours. Additionally, customers are often bothered by phone calls, which can lead to less than constructive conversations. The beauty of a recurring payment model is its ability to completely streamline payments, and Account Updater helps to do just that. The customer will receive a frictionless experience and you’ll be able to cut down on manual processes.
Your payment provider will query Visa and Mastercard (card schemes) directly for the updated card details. This will be done one of two ways. Firstly, if our customer receives an expired, lost or stolen response code for a transaction, we send a request for updated details on their behalf. Secondly, we proactively go out and query the card schemes for any cards that will expire before their next attempt to collect. In both situations, neither the business nor the customer will have any actions to complete. We make sure everything runs smoothly in the background.
When proactively searching for cards that are about to expire, we offer scheduled batch updates. By doing this, customers ensure that their collections are completely automated and run smoothly. Our customers can, of course, opt out of automated, scheduled runs. This gives them flexibility to query the card schemes as and when they need to.
In order to keep our customers in the loop, we send notifications when cards have been successfully or unsuccessfully updated. However, sometimes a card cannot be updated (the account being closed, for example). In these instances, we have some handy tools to make sure that, should you have to contact a customer, you know exactly how to tackle it. Our detailed issuer response codes will let you know exactly why a payment has been declined. This way, you’ll know what to say for a productive and fair conversation.
One unique aspect to the Acquired.com Account Updater solution is the ability to amend tokens with the updated card details. When a customer signs up for a recurring service, a token will be created. This is a secure, encrypted identifier for their payment details. By updating the token with new customer information, a new one will not have to be crated every time a customer’s card is expired, lost or stolen. The benefit of this is a far simpler reconciliation process. Your team will no longer have to keep track of multiple token references, saving them time and a lot of effort. Furthermore, you can disable any tokens that you no longer require.
Ultimately, if a customer has a subscription for a product or service that they enjoy, chances are they’re happy to keep paying for it. For them, a subscription is a perk as it involves no effort on their part each time it renews. And, for a business, having to reach out to customers is an unnecessary cost, easily solved by automating the process. Therefore, a solution like Account Updater provides a complete win-win result. Happy customers and a reduction of your bottom line.
