Make it Easy for Customers to Give You Money
This may sound like a no-brainer, but it’s something I’ve been slamming up against lately and the lesson here applies broadly. Recently here in Lima I received both my first water bill and electricity bill at my new place. In all the places I’ve rented before, the owner took care of this stuff, but now I’m in a house so it’s my responsibility. And boy is it confusing. Some services let you pay online with a credit card, some let you pay online but only with an affiliated bank account, some let you pay through your bank’s website (provided it’s a Peruvian bank), some don’t let you pay online at all, some allow you to pay online up to the due date and if you miss you have to pay in person, and some only take cash in person at one of their few offices. Wow, right?
While the business climate here is extremely different that other places and there isn’t as much concern for customer service, this is still a very bad business move if you want to get paid. This translates to the startup space in many ways… Do customers know where to click to pay you? Is it intuitive to arrive there? Is the payment process smooth? Can they use the same cards they generally use for internet transactions? Do they have to remember to pay every month or is automatic? Do they receive warnings about expired or otherwise invalid cards? I’ve experience this first hand with TweetSaver. A missed setting in the plan configuration and hundreds of customer accounts failed to renew automatically. Even after sending out manual email reminders, only a fraction of the customers re-enabled their subscription (I need to post more details on this sometime, as there is quite a bit more to it). The bottom line is that if there isn’t even one small hiccup somewhere, chances are pretty good that a lot of your customers will somehow manage to run into it, and this means lost sales and less money in your pocket.
