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Seven Questions to Ask When Choosing an Integrated Payments Partner

Embedded Payments

 

In Brief: Selecting the right payment partner is crucial for the success of your payment integration. A well-chosen partner can enhance customer experience, boost retention, and increase lifetime value. This article will share seven questions to ask when choosing an integrated payments partner to ensure you find a partner that aligns with your business and helps you achieve long-term success.

Success with your payment integration begins with your selection of payment partner. Get that part wrong, and your program may be fraught with issues. Get it right, and you can deliver an exceptional customer experience, drive customer retention, and increase customer lifetime value.

To help you evaluate payment partners, here are seven key questions to ask.

1. How straightforward is the integration process?

Your payments partner should offer a comprehensive integration library with clear documentation, so your team can efficiently connect to their APIs, as well as a developer portal. This is essential for a few reasons:

  • Efficient integration: Provides access to well-documented APIs, SDKs, and other integration tools that support different workflows. This reduces complexity and implementation time.
  • Self-service capabilities: Troubleshoot, access guides, and explore documentation independently to reduce reliance on support teams.
  • Testing environments: Validate your integration in a sandbox environment and test it in real-world scenarios before going live, ensuring a smooth transition and minimizing potential errors.
  • Support resources: This includes FAQs and direct channels to technical support, which empowers your development team to resolve issues quickly and keep projects moving efficiently.

 
2. How is customer service and support delivered?

Keep in mind the two audiences for service and support. First, your developers likely will need it during the integration process. So you’ll want to make sure you have timely access to technical support from your partner. If they’re slow to respond to your questions during the sales process, it’s a sign they’ll be slow to respond to your questions during implementation.

Secondly, your customers will need support as they use your integrated payment capability. Even if you have a white label program and manage customer support internally, a resource with payment expertise would be valuable. Most likely, your expertise lies in software and not payments. Having a payment partner that will train your staff on Level 1 and 2 customer service is essential to delivering the optimal customer experience.

3. What is your partnership strategy?

Find out how they support their partners’ success—do they offer you a dedicated relationship resource to work with you to ensure your program continues to meet the needs of your business and your customers? Here’s how to know if your integrated payments provider is equipped to support your success:

  • Do they understand your business goals? Your partner should cater their services to support your growth. One way is seeking to understand your long-term and short-term business goals.
  • Do they stay current with innovation? Evolving their payment technology to align with market trends and the evolving needs of your customers enables you to stay competitive and agile.
  • Is your communication open and collaborative? It’s not enough to discuss goals once as the marketplace and the needs of your business are dynamic. As a result, your partner should offer regular check-ins, feedback, and alignment on how your program is progressing and ways to continue to improve it.

A true partner is invested in your growth and continuously seeks ways to enhance the relationship.

4. How do they help you with customer adoption of your program?

Successful customer adoption of your payment integration is rooted in the partner strategy described above. A solid strategy will yield strong adoption. A weak or nonexistent strategy will result in subpar customer adoption.

Your payment partner should work with you to develop plans for three groups: 1) driving adoption of your current customers that do not use your payments, 2) migrating existing customers that may be using your integration from a previous partner, and 3) attracting new software prospects. The quicker you board customers onto your payment capability, the quicker you start generating revenue from your program.

5. What is your customer retention rate?

A payment partner’s customer retention rate is a strong indicator of their ability to deliver consistent service, support, and value. A retention rate of at least 90% suggests that customers are satisfied with their experience and trust the partner over the long term. Do they track their Net Promoter Score (NPS)? NPS is a standard measure of customer loyalty. Customers rate on a scale of 1-10 the answer to one question: “Would you recommend to a friend?” The scoring range is -100 to 100. The higher the number, the greater the customer loyalty.

However, it’s important to go beyond the numbers. Ask your current partner what drives their retention rate—do they actively invest in customer success, innovation, and relationship-building? A high retention rate should reflect not only good service but also a commitment to continuous improvement and adapting to your business’s evolving needs.

6. What is your pricing policy and revenue share?

Your payment provider should be transparent about the fees your customers will be charged. On the surface it would seem that higher customer prices are a good thing as they result in greater revenue share. While that is true, it is often short-lived revenue. Being overcharged for payment processing is a fast path to dissatisfaction and customer attrition.

A better approach is for your payment partner to work with your customers to help them qualify for the lowest possible interchange rates from Visa / Mastercard, etc. This makes your customers happy, and happy customers are loyal customers. And loyal customers drive your payment monetization.

Regarding revenue share, make sure the payment provider is crystal clear on what is included in their payment share model and what is not. Too often, software providers are underwhelmed by their actual payment revenue because their share percentage was based on a smaller pool than what they were expecting. Asking to see the math on the revenue share calculation will help safeguard you from that.

7. How do you address security and compliance concerns?

As fraud and data compromise threats rise, the security of digital payments is a critical factor in securing customer trust. Ask your prospective partner about fraud prevention measures. It should have security features integrated into its payment solution that help you protect customers and comply with the PCI DSS payment security standard.

In closing, the priority and weight you give to each of these questions depends on your strategy and objectives. If your focus is on personal service, then the answers to service and support questions will carry more weight. If it is payment monetization, the answer to the revenue share question will be a top priority.

Whichever objectives drive your research, due diligence is key. This will enable you to choose a partner aligned with your goals, creating a relationship that will endure as your software business grows.

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