How to Use Unattended Payments to Enhance the Customer Experience

While the pandemic may have helped to accelerate the rise of cashierless retail stores, the concept of unattended payment solutions has been around for many years. When it works well, unattended payments can enhance the customer experience by reducing friction at checkout. In the most dramatic examples, customers can walk into a store, make a selection, and walk back out without needing to pause at a register or kiosk.

But as a software vendor, your focus is much broader than that. If you’re developing unattended payment solutions, you’re looking for ways to deliver an excellent customer experience in use cases that range from cashierless retail stores to parking lot payment kiosks.

Payroc offers our merchant clients every type of payment method available to ensure they go to market with the most impactful solutions. Here are a few examples of how we’ve used unattended payments to improve the customer experience.

Providing Unattended Payment Options in an Attended Environment

Customers don’t always need to interact directly with staff. In some cases, these interactions can even become points of friction, leading to bottlenecks when it comes time to pay.

Our client Dencar offers a great example of this. Dencar owns and operates some of Ohio’s highest performing In-Bay Automatic car washes, capable of washing up to 60 cars per hour. But that volume of business isn’t possible if customers have to get out of their cars to pay an attendant. By partnering with Payroc to develop an unattended payment solution, Dencar was able to remove the friction from payment and complete more than 60,000 washes in the first year after launch.

Flexible Options for Customers and Merchants Alike

Another case worth consideration is our client LaundryCard, which offers laundromats an alternative to coin-operated machines. With a LaundryCard, customers can instead add funds to an account and operate machines digitally.

When LaundryCard wanted to add self-service, EMV-enabled payments at all their locations, they partnered with Payroc to expand their options. This allowed more customers to access laundry services while still enjoying a seamless unattended payment experience.

In each of these examples, the businesses in question were not unattended — they employed staff on-site to help customers and ensure smooth operations. But both benefitted from unattended payment solutions that enhanced the customer experience.

Creating Great Customer Experiences for Fully Unattended Payment Solutions

Sometimes “unattended” truly means unattended. In cases where there are no staff on-site to attend to customers, it’s especially important to ensure that everything runs as smoothly as possible.

For Parking BOXX, a leading parking system provider founded in 1939, providing a fully unattended parking payment solution was key to holding their market position. They came to Payroc looking for a way to accomplish this goal while still providing flexibility for their merchants to choose their own processor and bank.

Payroc developed an integration that made it possible for Parking BOXX to feature an unattended EMV certification with contactless, in-app, and e-commerce payment solutions. This integration also allows customers to easily pay virtually via the channel of their own choosing, leading to a better experience.

Self-Service That’s Fully Secure

Another example of how unattended EMV leads to enhanced customer experience can be found with our client MinuteKey, creator of the world’s first self-service key duplication machine. As a result of their kiosks being entirely unattended, MinuteKey needed a payment experience that was secure and easy to use.

Payroc ran a seamless integration that replaced MinuteKey’s legacy MSR readers with a secure fleet of unattended EMV devices. As a result, their customers enjoyed safer transactions without any loss of convenience.

Both these examples highlight the effectiveness of self-service kiosks, but also the importance of designing these systems around what customers need. When you provide customers with a secure, simple way to pay for a service, it enhances their entire experience.

New Payment Solutions for the World of Unattended Retail

The pandemic is not the only reason that unattended retail is becoming more common. Industry innovators have long understood that customers prefer not to wait in long lines to make purchases. While self-scanning checkouts are now a staple of many retail stores, even those stations can’t offer the kind of convenience that an unattended store can provide.

One of the most exciting examples of this new retail frontier comes from our client Nourish + Bloom Market, the first Black-owned autonomous grocery store. The company envisioned a contactless way to provide customers with access to locally sourced health foods, making it possible to simply “walk in and walk out” with fresh, nutritious produce, dairy, and more.

Payroc helped them create a system that allows customers to simply scan a QR code, select what they want, then walk out of the store with their groceries. No need to wait on cashiers or stand in a self-scanning line; instead, the environment is built to be as intuitive and easy as possible to create a customer experience that’s 100% friction free.

As demand for unattended payment solutions continues to rise, so will the need for software to support it. Choosing a payment processing partner who has real-world experience with these solutions is the best way to ensure a positive customer experience.