As Published on PYMNTS.com, February 20, 2020
Consumers have somewhat of a fickle relationship with security when it comes to transactions. Most report that they want security, and they are sincere in their reporting. However, as Kount Chief Customer Experience Officer Richard Stuppy noted, when it comes to their actual commitment in policing their own transactional security and letting it drive their decisions, it doesn’t have all that much of an effect.
“Consumers know that, for most payment types, they aren’t going to be liable for the fraud if it happens, so it isn’t acting as a major inhibitor or influence on their thinking,” Stuppy said.
What moves the consumer, he explained, is the experience — what will work fastest, smoothest and with the least number of inconvenient clicks or data-entry stutter steps between them and their goal. It is why, he noted, we see stats like the latest data in the January edition of the Kount and PYMNTS Mobile Order-Ahead Tracker, which found that only 32 percent of customers are using mobile order-ahead, and only 28 percent are paying in-app. This isn’t so much of a security gap as a convenience gap.
Customers like mobile order-ahead, but only when the quick-service restaurants (QSRs) in question have optimized it for their use.
For example, many payment options favored by consumers have not been implemented by QSRs, which “have instead been sticking with a long-standing tradition that a few big players put into place of only using a reloadable card to pay for mobile orders,” he said. “It is only recently that we’ve seen more going multi-tender over [the] top of that reloadable gift card embedded in the app, and it was hard to get there.”
The real lesson, he added, is that mobile order-ahead — and all its functionality — has the potential to be a transformative force in the QSR space, but there is still quite a bit to be done on the security and experience side for it to live up to that potential.