While the unattended payments market is quite different from vending machines of the past, the concept and potential business growth remain the same. Give people the opportunity to purchase on their own, and merchants can capture more revenues.
Today’s most competitive merchants are adopting innovative ways to optimize processes while growing revenue and meeting consumer demands and expectations with unattended payments.
Here are six benefits unattended payments offer your clients:
1. An Option for Making the Most of Resources
Research has found that 46 percent of retailers are frequently understaffed, and more than half of this group say customer experience suffers because of it. Unattended payments help merchants address the challenge of not having enough employees to handle store traffic. Unattended payments allow customers to complete transactions on their own. Additionally, implementing kiosks or other self-checkout solutions for payments enables merchants to allocate labor resources to more complex tasks, like providing excellent customer service.
2. A Plan for Decreasing Costs
As inflation remains high, merchants are challenged to maintain a healthy bottom line without price increases that discourage business. Unattended payments give merchants a solution for controlling labor costs. In fact, some merchants in the QSR space have even gone as far as having an entirely unattended front-of-house, which can decrease the number of employees per shift and control overtime.
3. A Tool for Enhancing Customer Experiences
Modern shoppers – a decisive majority at 80 percent — prefer self-service kiosks with unattended payments. The primary reason is faster checkout. Customers shopping in-store, particularly for just a few items, want to be able to scan and go precisely when they are ready without having to wait, even for a single customer. Additionally, kiosks can help build customer loyalty by prompting new sign-ups and delivering personalized experiences to repeat customers within a few clicks.
4. A Tactic for Increasing Revenues
With unattended payments, merchants never miss an opportunity to upsell. Kiosks can be automatically programmed to deliver the right upselling or cross-selling messages to customers every time, resulting in customers spending as much as 20 percent more on their orders. It can be extremely challenging to train employees to do this as consistently and successfully as technology can.
5. Data for Learning Customer Behaviors
Customers are highly likely to accept the offers suggested by unattended payment kiosks because of the technology’s ability to deliver the right messages at the right time. This is made possible in part through the kiosk’s ability to collect and interpret customer purchasing behavior. Merchants can then use this data to feature high-priced, popular items and make the “perfect pairing” to those items based on customer preference. Then, with a system that accepts the customer’s preferred payment method, revenues are captured quickly and easily.
6. An Effective System for Expanding Reach
Unattended payment kiosks open the door for merchants to sell to new markets and in new locations without exponentially increasing expenses. For example, products could be sold through a vending solution at a shopping center or airport. Micro markets for food and beverages are gaining popularity and restaurateurs have the opportunity to leverage kiosks to bring their brand to the breakrooms of local businesses and other facilities.
Unattended Payments are Vital to an Integrated Payments Ecosystem
Modern merchants are leveraging self-service solutions to meet consumer demands while growing business revenue. Unattended payments must be part of an integrated payments ecosystem to optimize back-office processes for merchants while providing consumers with their choice of payment method.
Work with an omnichannel payments provider with expertise in unattended payments solutions to give your clients these benefits. Contact us to learn more.
