Although payment processors for high-risk businesses have many applications, the main aspect people tend to focus on is their security and fraud prevention from the point of view of the high-risk businesses themselves. This is a perfectly valid perspective, as high-risk businesses do need safe payment processors.
However, the right payment solution offers much more than security to businesses in high-risk industries. It is crucial for all general marketing purposes, including client retention. To explore exactly why and how this works, here are a few of the many ways high-risk payment solutions can improve customer retention for high-risk businesses.
1. Reduce Chargebacks
When businesses complain about chargebacks, they usually do so with a focus on the loss of revenue either because of legitimate chargebacks from customers or fraudulent chargebacks from scammers. Chargebacks can be frustrating for the customers too, however, when they are not fraudulent. In many cases, a legitimate chargeback can take numerous days to resolve and require a lot of back-and-forth communication, which can be immensely frustrating for the customers themselves.
This, in turn, can naturally lead to the loss of a potential long-term customer, as they often wouldn’t want to work with that business again. Good payment processors specializing in high-risk businesses, however, have very robust tools for detecting, preventing, and resolving chargebacks.
Paycompass, for example, is a payment solution that specializes in both the prevention and fast resolution of chargeback claims. The speed of such resolutions is key as it eliminates (or minimizes) the clients’ frustration and retains them as future customers.
2. Quicker Processing Means a Positive Experience
Speed is essential not only when it comes to chargebacks but in general. A good payment processor for high-risk industries has a lot of processes working on the background to ensure safety and security, but it also optimizes the speed of such processes. This guarantees a satisfactory experience for both the business that is the processor’s client and for their own clients. And, needless to say, fast processing speeds are very convenient for your customers.
3. Guarantee Smoother Transactions
How smooth a transaction is depends on many things, not merely on its speed. The lack of processing errors and the clarity and ease of use of the UI, for example, are also crucial for customer satisfaction and retention. While these may not sound like priorities of high-risk business payment processors, they actually are a key focus of such payment solutions, as the complicated processes taking place behind the UI need to be made as easy to navigate as possible to be usable.
4. Ensure Proper Security
Security itself is also helpful not only for the high-risk business itself but for its clients. Many of the fraud attempts that plague high-risk businesses don’t actually look to steal money from businesses, but data from their clients.
Losing your credit card information or other personal data while making a simple transaction with a business in a high-risk niche is a huge blow for anyone and almost always results in the loss of a customer for the business.
5. Maintain Good Brand Reputation
The above issues are problematic for businesses not only because they can lose individual customers, but because such issues harm the brand’s overall reputation and trustworthiness. A client that has lost their credit card info to a scammer during an innocent transaction with a particular business won’t just stop using that service. Instead, they will often make their complaint loud and public, and try to warn other potential customers about the risks of working with that business.
This is understandable and usually justified on the part of the customer too. After all, if the high-risk business had used a better payment processor, the fraud likely wouldn’t have happened and the customer wouldn’t have lost their personal data.
So, making sure that you always use the best possible payment processor for your high-risk business is essential for maintaining a good brand reputation, retaining your customer base, and making future gains.
Choosing the right payment processor is a must for any business, but especially for those operating in high-risk industries. Trying to navigate the treacherous waters of a high-risk niche is tricky enough in and of itself, but doing so and growing your customer base is a nigh-impossible task without a really good, secure, and fast payment processor.
