Seamless service 101: What it is and why it’s important | Stripe

Seamless service 101: What it is and why it’s important

Payments

Accept payments online, in person, and around the world with a payments solution built for any business – from scaling startups to global enterprises.

Learn more

People who shop across multiple channels—that’s 73% of customers—have a higher customer lifetime value (LTV) than those who shop through a single channel. And a recent study by Salesforce found that 88% of customers say the experience a company provides is as important to them as its products or services.

While businesses should prioritise creating seamless customer experiences, it’s not always obvious what that means. In this guide, we’ll explain what it means to understand your customers, the importance of seamless service, and how Stripe’s approach to unified commerce can enable businesses to create optimal customer experiences.

What does it mean to understand your customer?

The foundation for creating great, seamless customer experiences starts with gaining a deep understanding of your customers and what drives them at various stages of their buying journey.

Please be aware that this guide is for informational purposes, and it is not intended to provide legal advice. Note that privacy laws vary widely across the globe. Please talk to your legal advisors to understand how to collect and use data in compliance with your obligations under applicable laws, such as the EU’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR).

Developing a strong customer understanding may involve collecting information, including:

Demographics
- Attributes such as age, gender, income level, education, occupation, and family status can help you understand the specific needs and preferences of your target customers.
Psychographics
- Your customers’ motivations, aspirations, beliefs, and lifestyle choices are psychological and emotional factors that influence their behaviour.
Customer behaviour
- Analysing aggregated purchasing patterns, product usage, browsing habits, and social media activity can help you identify patterns and preferences that can inform your marketing and sales strategies.
Feedback and reviews
- Monitoring customer feedback and reviews on social media, review websites, and other platforms can help you identify areas for improvement and understand your customers’ pain points and needs.
Competitors
- Studying your competitors’ products is a powerful way to help you identify gaps in the market and develop unique value propositions that differentiate your brand.

There are many ways to collect this information and build detailed customer profiles including:

Customer sign-up and account creation
- In exchange for perks such as loyalty points, free or faster shipping, or simply the convenience of having payment details on file, businesses can prompt customers to create an account or sign up to make a purchase. This allows the business to collect basic demographic information such as name, email, and shipping address. Information such as a credit card or phone number can serve as a unique identifier to enable more accurate tracking.
Payment data
- Transaction history and card fingerprinting help build an understanding of product preferences and purchasing behaviour. Businesses can use purchase history to recommend similar products or create personalised promotions.
Online cookies
- Cookies can track customers’ online behaviour, such as browsing history and shopping-cart contents. Businesses can use this information to personalise the customer experience and create more targeted marketing campaigns, done in accordance with local regulations and privacy laws, such as the GDPR.
Market research firms
- Businesses can work with market research firms to collect customer data through surveys, focus groups, and other research methods.

The next step involves organising and connecting data. Here are some common ways that businesses do so:

Application programming interfaces (APIs)
- APIs are a set of protocols and standards that allow different software applications to communicate with each other. They help integrate customer or payments data with other applications.
Data warehousing
- Data warehousing consolidates large amounts of data from multiple sources, enabling businesses to gain insights and improve decision-making.
Customer relationship management (CRM)
- CRM software can help companies store, organise, and track real-time customer behaviour and purchase history.
Enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems
- An ERP system manages day-to-day operations, integrating customer and transaction data with systems for inventory and fulfilment.

What is seamless service?

With seamless service, all touchpoints throughout a customer’s buying journey are personalised, situationally relevant, and consistent, and the experience is effortless and free of interruptions or inconveniences.

Examples of seamless service in different settings:

Retail

A store offers in-store pickup or home delivery for orders, with returns also possible regardless of purchase method.
Customers can pay by various payment methods including credit cards, local payment methods, bank transfers, and digital wallets.

Restaurant

Online ordering and payment at the table are facilitated, with self-serve kiosks to reduce waiting times.

Hospitality

Booking and managing reservations are streamlined, with options like mobile check-in and room service orders through a mobile app.

How to create a seamless customer experience

Seamless service is situationally relevant, personalised, and free of friction. Businesses should audit their buying journey and identify all touchpoints in the customer journey to understand where customers may encounter roadblocks.

Strategies for seamless service:

Auditing the buying journey
Using data to personalise experiences
Investing in technology to streamline processes
Continuously monitoring and improving

How does Stripe enable seamless service?

Stripe’s unified commerce solution addresses concerns on both front and back ends.

Key Features:

Support multiple channels and payment methods
Engineer true channel convergence
Create consistent customer identities across channels
Centralise customer and payment data

With Stripe, businesses can provide a continuous experience as customers transact and engage across multiple channels, resulting in higher conversion, increased customer satisfaction and loyalty, and higher customer LTV.

For a deeper dive into unified commerce and how Stripe powers it, read our complete guide here.