Cashless payments are gaining popularity fast, and intelligent businesses are using the associated data to adapt services to fit these customer buying habits.
Cashless payments have overtaken cash for the first time
Back in 2015, cashless payments overtook cash as the most popular means of paying for goods and services. It’s estimated that cash will comprise just 25% of all payments made by 2025.
This has been driven in part by the myriad of new cashless payment options open to consumers, such as:
- Credit and debit card-based payments, including Chip and Pin and contactless
- Online shopping and banking, including traditional bank and e-commerce websites, as well as the likes of PayPal and even Bitcoin
- Mobile device-based payment, including Apple Pay and Android Pay
Customers have a much lower threshold for using cashless payments, too. Whereas customers would once have used them for big ticket items only, they’re now used for everyday transactions of almost any size.
This is great for businesses a cashless payments gather much more data, including:
- In-store card payment: Logs time, date, location and customer identity.
- Online payments: Records the IP address, which is usually linked to a specific location
- Mobile payments: Captures location of purchase using Wi-Fi or phone tower triangulation
This combination of ubiquity and data gathering makes cashless payments an effective way of analysing customer buying habits and adopting your services accordingly.
These are some of the questions you can answer by analysing individual customer buyer behaviour using cashless payment data:
Online vs offline purchasing
- Does the customer prefer to shop in-store, or online?
- Do they purchase different items online and in-store?
- Does this represent a wider trend among customers?
Logging data on these factors can help you decide whether it’s worthwhile investing more in your business’ online or physical presence.
Purchased item types
- What types of items do particular customers buy?
- How often and at what intervals do they purchase specific items?
- Is there a difference between the items they purchase using cash/cashless?
- Do they tend to spend more using cashless methods?
- Does the items they’ve purchased indicate a wider theme (e.g. going on holiday)
Getting to grips with these answers can enhance your customer profiles, aid resource allocation and identify opportunities to improve payment systems.
Marketing analysis
- Do they have a daily routine that can be used to dispatch targeted marketing materials?
- Have customers walked past an advert/billboard before visiting a store?
- Have they made a purchase shortly after a marketing email has been dispatched?
- Which marketing resources are customers most receptive to?
- How valuable is a specific customer, or customer demographic?
Knowing the answers to these questions can help you add depth to your customer personas, personalise marketing to greater effect and review the ROI for different marketing initiatives.
Resource allocation
- Where can I deploy human and physical resources to maximum effect?
- How much of an item should I keep in stock?
- How frequently should I re-order specific items?
By collating and analysing data on these variables, you can optimise your staffing and resource allocation, as well as fine-tuning your logistics network.
Cashless payment is growing rapidly. Get ahead of the competition by turning your cashless payment data into an asset that helps you tailor services to accommodate specific customer buying habits.
Discover how Periscope® can help you make more out of your commercial data and draw actionable conclusions that can take your business to the next level.