Once you’ve reopened your restaurant, you’ll have to implement certain rules to ensure staff and customers stay safe, including social distancing. Adding touchless transactions to your operational model is a way to accommodate these necessary changes while ensuring an easy and effective workflow. One type of touchless transaction is consumer mobile payment, a truly contactless experience that places the payment process entirely in the customer’s hands.
Even though research shows almost half of all consumers now prefer to use mobile payment options due to infection concerns, this technology isn’t purely a COVID-19 demand. Mobile payments have been on the rise around the globe—it's becoming a trend poised to last well beyond the pandemic.
Restaurant owners who want to encourage proper social distancing and want to future-proof their business as payments continue to evolve will need to have a good strategy in place to adapt to the mobile payment trend.
Here are a few things to consider when adding contactless payment options:
- Select a payment platform that offers multiple payment options - This means including not only credit and debit cards, but also mobile payment (SMS), bank transfer, e-wallets, prepaid cards, direct deposit and cash on delivery. This allows you to cater to as many customers as possible.
- Make sure your customers receive a payment receipt - Payment failures and missing confirmations can make customers feel doubtful that they’ve actually completed the online or mobile payment. Automatic emails that contain a receipt of the payment and transaction details help build trust in the technology.
- Security standards should be high - Choose a system that offers the PCI Data Security Standard to make sure your system is safe, secure and reliable.
- The user interface needs to be easy and fast - Customers like things to be quick and simple, so avoid unnecessary steps or forms where customers need to input a lot of information.
- Choose a system that will deliver a smoother online payment experience by providing easy to read analytics and statistics - This will help you get a good overview of the customer journey for mobile payments, so you can make adjustments to enhance the experience when necessary.
- Plan to create a marketing strategy for communicating your contactless options – Having a marketing and communications strategy to define how you’ll promote your contactless payments is key.
- Make sure you have customer support - If there’s an issue, make sure your customers know where to turn for help.
Thinking about adding contactless payments to your restaurant customer experience? NCR Mobile Pay is a contactless solution that meets these requirements while giving your customers complete control over their payment experience: they just scan, pay and go. Learn more about NCR Mobile Pay or click here to sign up or get in touch.
