Winning customers is undoubtedly one of the most important things in business. But how important is it to keep customers satisfied after they arrive at your website? Although this is often overlooked, it is just as important as acquiring customers.
Imagine you have a business that collects payments at regular intervals (for example, monthly). You need to collect payments at set intervals from customers you have won with a great deal of effort. This process can be carried out manually every month, or it can be moved to the digital environment. To do this, customers’ card details can be saved so that collection happens automatically.
To increase the successful conversion rate of recurring collections, it is important to pay attention to the following points:
- When saving a credit card, you must run a TRY 1 test sale to check that the card is active. It is important to cancel (void) the transaction after the test collection succeeds.
- Not all cards on the market carry the Visa, Mastercard or Troy logo. The virtual POS you obtain must also support transactions from other payment schemes.
- When collecting payments, always review the response codes and descriptions of declined transactions. If many transactions are attempted in a row with the same card, the card and POS statuses may be blocked at the bank as part of its fraud controls. For example, codes such as 91-96 are system error codes. For such system errors, there is no harm in retrying the transaction at set intervals (for example, every 5 minutes). But for codes such as 51-Insufficient Limit or 57-Card Not Enabled for Mail Order, you must contact the customer before attempting a new transaction.
- Make sure the card saved in the system is a credit card. This is because authorization cannot be obtained for non-3D transactions with debit cards, which can cause problems with recurring payments.
- Before saving the card, always ask the customer which day of the month they want the payment to be made. Otherwise, you may get an insufficient limit error when charging the card, and you may have to call the customer again and again.
Although the points above may seem simple, overlooking them can create serious workload and lost payments. By paying attention to them, you will both increase transaction volume and improve satisfaction among merchants and cardholders.
