Growing Customer Retention with Smart Payouts

growing-customer-retention-with-smart-payouts
Illustrations by Drishya Subramaniam

Introduction

In today’s highly competitive business landscape, retaining customers is a crucial goal for sustainable growth. With smart payout solutions, merchants can streamline their payment processes, enhance customer experiences, and ultimately foster long-term loyalty. Join us as we delve into the benefits of utilising smart payouts to fuel customer retention, empowering merchants to thrive in an increasingly customer-centric marketplace.

The Startup Palette: Need for Smart Payouts

The idea for that new startup had been bouncing around in your head for months. You shoot your shot, get some venture capital to get the business off the ground, assemble a great team, and work tirelessly to bring the idea to life, and soon (or long) enough, you have your business up and running.

But, managing an online business is like juggling a hundred balls at once, while riding a unicycle. And these balls? - heavy as bowling balls. Product, Engineering, Design, Operations, Marketing, Customer Success, you juggle all these while trying to ensure a state of the art customer experience.

Painting a great Customer Experience can’t be done with just one broad brushstroke. Precise and diligent strokes come together to coalesce into a masterpiece. And among these series of strokes, lies the one of “Payments Experience.” It has all the hues - from plethora of payment options, robust touches of security and compliance to seamless payouts for refunds.

While each of these demand their own study, Seamless Payouts is a less known colour in this palette.

What are Payouts?

A payout is a form of payment made by a business to its stakeholders (vendors, partners, employees, and customers) in lieu of services availed. From, the sweet sound of your salary hitting your bank account at the month’s end to the refund you receive when you return a T-shirt that you didn’t like - Payouts are a critical hue to get right for any business.
Types of payouts

Refunds

Customers love paying for Products and Services they like, but sometimes things go south, and customers end up returning the said product(s) or service(s). Refunds serve as a vital payout method for merchants, playing a crucial role in customer retention. Efficient and seamless refund processes are essential for building trust and loyalty. By leveraging smart payout solutions, merchants can automate and expedite refunds, ensuring prompt reimbursements and a frictionless experience. Effective refund handling contributes to positive brand reputation and enhances customer retention efforts.

Painting the Perfect Payouts Painting

How does an online business paint the perfect the payouts experience? One that reduces the operational overhead and assuages customer retention. There are two broad problem statements here.

  1. How do you Reduce refund timelines?
  2. How do you Power seamless refunds for Cash on Delivery orders?

The Refund timeline

Typically, any refund takes between 2-7 days, depending on the payment method and the customer’s bank account. On an average, customers contact merchants’ customer care in case they do not receive the refund within a couple of days. This ends up forming a large chunk of all customer queries and is a huge cost centre for most businesses.

Cash is (still) King

Arguably, India’s greatest e-commerce innovation was perfecting “Cash on Delivery” and “seamless returns.” You invite a slew of overheads but enable trust in a tough customer market.

Powering seamless refunds post the return is a great lever for customer retention. One of the most common ways to handle refunds for COD orders is to push the refund amount to the app wallet. But, not all customers desire that route of refund. Being able to settle the amount directly to the customers’ bank accounts encourages a deeper level of trust building b/w customers and online businesses.

Juspay for Smart Payouts

Instant and Robust

From CoD and Instant refunds, Vendor payments, Loan disbursement, Gaming winnings, to Salary payments, Juspay helps you paint the perfect Payouts picture owing to direct integrations with Visa and MasterCard, and with various banks and PGs to support UPI, IMPS and NEFT Payouts.

With Success rates of over 99%, Juspay’s Smart Payouts helps to transfer money instantly, saving time, Operational overheads and Technical bandwidth.

Seamless Refunds

Issuing payouts on the cards, instead of reversing the original transaction can lead to faster and near instantaneous refund timelines. The transfer of funds happens to the source (Debit / Credit Card) via Visa Direct and MasterSend payment rails. The Payout transaction is settled instantly, increasing the NPS and drastically reducing customer queries.

With this approach, online businesses can reduce the load on their Customer Success team by a staggering 80%.

COD Refunds

Juspay’s Smart Payouts layer comes to the rescue for this specific use case. Smart Payouts is integrated with a bank and works across UPI and Bank transfers. The customer only has to share their VPA or bank details for us to initiate a payout. The smart layer then triggers the payout through the appropriate rails (UPI or IMPS). In case a particular PA or IMPS rails are down, the payout is retried after some time. If retries on the same PA/PG fail, then we retry the transaction through an alternative PA/PG to maximize conversions. This allows the merchants to do a single initiation and not worry about failures or pendency, as the smart router automatically handles such cases.

Seamless Payouts and Happy Customers

As businesses take measures to tackle the surging rate of returns and subsequent overheads, a seamless refunds experience can reinforce customer retention and trust. Instantaneous refunds help you steer away from a detrimental impact on the valuable relationships that you’ve spent so long building with your loyal customers.

Before you go

As you build, refine and grow your business, it is imperative to have a payments partner who understands the complexities and challenges that come in the journey and can help you navigate the same.

Juspay is the payments platform of choice for India’s leading companies, who partner with us right from their early days. We provide a future-proof end-to-end infrastructure connecting directly to 300+ Payment Gateways, Networks like Visa, Mastercard, and NPCI, and your customers’ favorite payment methods. Juspay’s innovative products have transformed the payments experience, turning payments into a growth lever for your business.

We’re part of India’s growth story, one which makes Payments seamless for her startup ecosystem and her billion citizens. Are you ready? Explore how Juspay can hyper-charge your growth story.