Visa held the 2017 Merchant Forum in Cape Town recently, bringing their global experts to share insights with local merchants and showcase their new merchant focused offerings that enable greater customer engagement, marketing collaboration, and data insights.
The forum was specifically designed to speak to non-bank Visa clients that are on the acceptance side of payments, including large retailers, airlines, and government departments.
Speaking at the forum, John Conlon, Digital Lead, Visa Performance Solutions (CEMEA), discussed the latest consumer trends and how Visa is able to partner with merchants to create greater reach and insights.
Visa has developed several solutions specifically for merchants, in order to help them provide better customer service.
According to Conlon the customer purchasing journey has shifted. It is no longer enough to provide multiple channels for payment. Merchants need to move from omni-channel to ‘opti-channel’ – knowing exactly where and how the customer wants to purchase the product, and be able to meet them at this point.
As digital technology drives increasing customer engagement, merchants need to be able to optimise the user experience, provide a frictionless payment, set dynamic pricing and benchmarking, and encourage cross-selling and up-selling.
Visa is empowering the merchant across these areas by partnering closely with merchants to provide real data and analytics that the merchant can use. This includes platforms that enable market basket analysis, authorisation and declines management, and consumer trends and habits reporting. By sharing these insights with merchants, Visa is hoping to help merchants optimise their offerings and reduce declines.
Visa’s Advanced Authorization for example not only gives merchants insights into what transactions where declined, but uses advanced analytics to look at how the declines can be minimised in the future, or how declined transactions can be resolved.
Visa’s Market Basket Analysis platform on the other hand allows merchants to analyse customer’s everyday spending patterns, to support effective marketing initiatives and unlock potential new revenue streams.