Beyond Paperless Receipts

Challenge

Create a better consumer and merchant post-purchase experience by integrating transaction, receipt, guarantee and reconciliation data at both ends of the interaction.

Considerations

1. How to maintain the “high” the customer feels at point of purchase? Tackling consumer frustrations post-purchase around locating information for returns, exchanges and repairs to maintain a positive consumer-merchant relationship and drive loyalty

2. How to remove cost for the merchant? Streamlining and automating more of the post-purchase activities including reconciliation, stock check and customer service interactions to reduce manual processing costs

3. How to drive consumer spending with the merchant? Optimizing the merchant-consumer relationship with accurate post-purchase data to enable timely communications

Solution

1. By linking eReceipts to line items in the transaction purchase data, they can automatically be added to a mobile wallet linked to the initial payments method. Remove the friction currently involved at POS email-address-based digital receipts, which are easily lost. Integration of receipts into easily searchable payment records in a mobile app could be extended to include other digital documentation, such as the guarantee or instructions for an item to maximize self-serve options for an “uber-esque” customer experience. 

Further improvements to customer experience would come from linking the purchase data with categorization of spend across any method or merchant from a single location including credit card reconciliation to support consumer controls and awareness around spend management.

2. Better self-serve options would help reduce customer frustration during post-transaction dealings with the merchant, as well as reduce costs associated with customer service calls.

The implementation of a standard interface to export the receipts to other systems, such as corporate expense management systems, via spreadsheet and photographic outputs, would create a chargeable model for corporate banking customers that helps remove expense and productivity losses at the customer end to provide a strong business case.

3. Merchants can find further value in the data aggregation against the purchases by linking upsell activities into the same post-purchase communications cycle that still drives customer experience. Offering cost-effective insurance packages, easy warranty extensions, simplified product recalls or upgrade special offers that continue the merchant-customer relationship, as well as boosting customer satisfaction and loyalty. Direct alerts through the same post-purchase mobile-app interface, controlled by consumer preferences ensures timely and relevant communications that enhance the merchant-customer relationship and drives consumer spending.

CX optimization

Ensure the experience is seamless across all purchasing locations (online and in store), payment types and payment providers. It needs to be automatically available in real time across a synchronous mobile wallet, online account and bank statement.

This necessitates a single provider that could be the bank, or a new FinTech, providing this value-added service to banking customers via Open APIs that either integrate the FinTech as a partner or white label the new offering.