Customers’ expectations for seamless mobile user experiences (UX) grow higher by the day. The ubiquity and immediacy of mobile devices demand that websites are quick to load, well designed, and fully optimized for mobile. In 2020, 56.32% of all web traffic flowed through mobile devices—but mobile devices also tend to have a higher bounce rate than desktop users, and tablet users bounce at a rate somewhere in between mobile and desktop. And the decision to abandon mobile sites happens quickly. When page load time goes from one second to 10 seconds, the likelihood of a mobile site visitor bouncing increases 123%.
Google’s mobile-first indexing ranks websites by looking at their mobile version first and falling back to the desktop version if mobile is unavailable. This signals the importance of employing a cohesive mobile strategy also optimized for search engine optimization (SEO). In addition, users are becoming more aware of the gap between mobile-optimized websites and those that aren’t. They simply don’t have the time, or the patience, to pinch and zoom to try to find the information they need.
4 mobile-focused approaches to bill payments
One study shows that 21% of consumers have used a company’s mobile app to pay a bill. If you’re a business that accepts online bill payments from your customers, presenting a seamless mobile UX is more important than ever. Given the higher propensity for consumers to abandon mobile sites, the prospect of losing the associated online payment dollars is a risk too big to ignore.
What are some steps that you can take to maximize your business’s mobile UX for bill payments? It begins with a website fully optimized for mobile and extends to other interaction points facilitated by mobile technology. Here are four approaches to consider.
- Responsive web design – Responsive web design (RWD) automatically recognizes the size of a device screen that’s used to access your billing and payments website. This technology renders the page correctly for various screen sizes by altering the navigation hierarchy, position of text labels, length of text, etc. This automatic adaption presents users with the most actionable links and information in an intuitive way, helping streamline the bill payment process. Make sure your electronic bill presentment and payment (EBPP) solution is built to respond to your customers no matter what device they choose to use.
- Bill and payment-related text alerts – Text messaging is an integral part of our daily lives, with Americans spending 25% of their mobile screen time per day texting. And people are engaged with their texts, with 74% of consumers responding to a text message from a business within an hour. This high level of engagement makes text messaging an important way to communicate billing and payments information directly to your customers. Make sure your EBPP solution allows you to send SMS text messages to your customers that alert them when bills are ready to pay, payments are made, etc. These prompts can help encourage on-time payments and keep your customers up-to-date on all activity related to their billing and payments.
- Bill payments-by-text – Take text alerts one step further by allowing your customers to make payments via text message. Billing and payments solutions are now built to support bill payments via SMS when a customer links their cell phone number to their EBPP user account. Alerts can be sent and payments can be made without ever having to leave the text messaging interface. Your customers can type a simple command like “PAY” to complete the bill payment transaction.
- Messaging platforms – Messaging technology is also an important part of consumers’ mobile lives. For instance, Facebook Messenger is used by an estimated 1.3 billion people, with over 20 billion messages sent between people and businesses monthly. This is yet another communication channel where you can engage with your customers and encourage them to make payments directly through their mobile devices. By giving them the ability to link their Facebook accounts to your EBPP, you can enable them to make payments directly through Facebook Messenger using chatbot technology. The result is an intuitive, user-friendly customer experience built with convenience in mind.
The Bottom Line: Seamless mobile experiences, including bill payments, are more important to your customers than ever. Make sure your business’s EBPP solution gives them the options they need to make bill payments quickly and easily through the mobile channels of their choice.
Payments modernization is key. Learn why pay by text is so important in 3 Reasons Why You Need to Offer Pay by Text—Now.
* This is an update on an original post published April 2018
Alacriti’s Orbipay EBPP is a customizable electronic billing and payments solution for businesses and financial institutions of all sizes. Pay by Text is just one of several Orbipay EBPP features available to help you accelerate receivables. For more information, please contact us at info@alacriti.com.
