Anyone blessed with the need for glasses has probably been into Specsavers and, like me, you will have seen how the retailer uses iPads to add that personal touch while you recover from the rigours of an eye test. But now the company is looking to up the game and use mobile as a way of also handling payments.
Mobile payments are increasingly popular with consumers driven by familiarity with Apple Pay and one-click m-commerce payments online. According to a new Forrester Data report – Mobile Payments Forecast 2016 to 2021 – payments will almost triple over the next five years, from $52 billion at the end of 2015 to $148 billion by 2021, driven by the need to improve and ‘internet-ise’ in store experience.
The use of iPads has proved hugely popular with Specsavers customers, says the retailer. However, it also faced a challenge in terms of wanting to be able to improve the customer journey even more by allowing customers to make card payments at the desk rather than taking the customer to a busy till point. This would enable them to create a very personalised customer experience journey.
But to do this the company faced the challenge of managing mobile payments in a bank approved manner and making this work with its aging POS, which didn’t naturally support m-payments.
The Solution
So Specsavers turned to PMC and its mobile payment solution, Store Enabler. Store Enabler has been specifically designed to meet the mobile payment challenge in a Customer Present environment. It manages POS peripherals such as scanners, printers and payment devices and can be driven from the customer’s POS application or their website. PMC’s Solution Architects and off-shore development team were able to develop modifications to the POS application which enabled it to interface with and drive Store Enabler.
The Result
The end result is an easy to use solution on an iPad. This allows the Specsavers associate to extend the highly personal customer experience all the way through to the end of the card payment transaction without the need for the customer to move around the store. It allows Specsavers to put more till points in the store very economically therefore easing transaction completion without causing crowding.
Store Enabler even gives the associate the option of printing the customer’s receipt to the nearest available printer. Within weeks of implementation in the initial trial stores, over 45% of card transactions were being managed by Store Enabler. So far £10.2 million in transactions has been taken through Store Enabler. 126 stores already have Store Enabler live.
