The importance of high-tech, low-touch payments

June 22, 2022

Hayley Fisher

BRAND POST: With international borders reopening and Australia starting to see the return of large-scale events, such as Formula 1 in Melbourne and Vivid in Sydney, demand for leisure experiences is on the rise.

This is a great opportunity for businesses that can flex and meet the changing needs of guests.

Guests’ expectations have significantly evolved. Seamless ticket purchases and personalised customer experience are important in attracting and retaining customers across venues. Today, customers are seeking high-tech and low-touch options, particularly when it comes to payments - whether at ticketing points, while purchasing merchandise, food and drinks or when navigating upgrades, and refunds.

How payments can drive a positive impact on customer experience

An integrated payments platform lets guests pay conveniently with minimal touch, including seamless check in and check out using their own devices, all the while giving recreational businesses key insights into customer journeys. A low-touch and frictionless environment can have a positive impact on the customer experience, significantly reducing the amount of time spent on manual tasks, freeing up even more time for staff to better engage guests.

One example of this can be seen from guest experience platform ROLLER software, where high-tech, low-touch payment methods are key to enabling a frictionless and personalised service. At ROLLER, delighting guests at every touchpoint is crucial to its business philosophy. Through Adyen, ROLLER is leveraging unified commerce to expand quickly across multiple locations, manage risk, track results and gather rich customer insights across all touchpoints, from one integration. By utilising Adyen’s unified commerce solution, ROLLER now comes equipped with a singular and complete view of the guest journey across every touchpoint.

Another example of payments positively impacting the tourism industry can be seen with Raffles Hotel Singapore, a business that believes in delivering bespoke and authentic services for a legendary experience.

Through Adyen, Raffles Hotel Singapore is one of the first hotels in Singapore to offer a truly contactless check-in and check-out with tokenised payments. This powers Raffles Hotel Singapore’s unified commerce offering, providing simpler, faster, and more customer-centric payment experiences across all sales channel touch points, both online to offline – including suite reservations, restaurants and bars, Raffles Spa and Raffles Boutique.

Streamlined processes and enhanced data security key to customer experience
When various accounting systems are in operation at recreational venues, it can sometimes cause confusion and result in reduced efficiencies. Furthermore, with labour shortages hampering the industry’s recovery, it’s not surprising that more and more recreational businesses are turning to automation to improve outcomes. This is where a streamlined system can efficiently pull everything together - including payments for reservations, at restaurants, in-room dining, day spas, events, meetings and conferences and more.

A number of payment consolidation platforms have emerged with systems designed to help a recreational business simplify its financial ecosystem and improve business efficiency. Leisure businesses work with multiple suppliers and systems, and many are looking for ways to address challenges, including integrating both legacy and new infrastructures. Finding a solution that smoothly integrates across a businesses’ entire technolgy stack will help with streamlining processes and costs.

Enhanced data security is essential when introducing systems like these, to ensure guests’ information is protected. Recreational businesses work with many external parties, systems, and distribution channels to support guest bookings. This can be extremely challenging and complex, and the burden of managing so many different payment systems often falls on the businesses.

With the added complexities of regulations that work to improve payment security, recreational businesses need to get ahead of fighting fraud and securing their guest payments. Automation will be critical to manage the resurgence in guest volume. Leisure businesses can adopt a single end-to-end payments platform that allows them to experiment without sacrificing usability, security, or consistency. For instance, Adyen takes the Payment Card Industry (PCI) compliance burdens out of leisure businesses’ hands, enabling them to make payments a force of innovation - instead of a business-as-usual process with downside risks.

Leisure businesses are at the forefront when it comes to delivering exceptional guest experiences. To ensure that this gold standard is consistently met, businesses need to keep themselves updated on new technologies, such as in payments. By integrating the latest payments technologies, recreational businesses can deliver truly a seamless customer experience.

Click here to contact Roller Software via their entry in the Australasian Leisure Management Supplier Directory.

Image: Raffles Hotel Singapore.

About the author

Hayley Fisher

Country Manager Australia and New Zealand, Adyen

Hayley Fisher is Country Manager Australia and New Zealand for Adyen.

Click here to contact her via LinkedIn.

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