The ‘Pay & Withdraw’ experience is one of the seven key Customer Experiences Kindred is focusing on to embrace a customer outside-in approach to how the business operates, organises, designs and delivers change.
The ‘Pay & Withdraw’ experience includes journeys such as opening the cashier, choosing deposit & withdraw methods, confirming both deposit and withdraw or receiving funds in your bank account, with each of those journeys being further broken down into journey steps or micro-journeys. The experience also manages all customers financial accounts, securing their funds the same way a bank does it.
The vision for the ‘Pay & Withdraw’ experience is built on three high-level CX principles (i.e: Relevancy, Speed & Trust) and is one that is instant, seamless, and lets customers deposit and withdraw their money using their preferred method. For customers to have the confidence to part with their money, we must also ensure that the payment process feels reliable and trustworthy.
Trust as a key factor
Stability and transparency in the payment process are key to the experience, and key factors into gaining customer trust. After all, we are asking our customers to trust us with their money! The experience is working closely with all our payment partners to improve stability and transparency. Today, the Kindred platform enables more than 35 payment options, all relevant to every single market Kindred operates within. The variety of payment options is constantly revised to be as locally adapted as possible as well as providing the best CX.
Being compliant and secure is an absolute must when it comes to processing payments and gaining and retaining customer trust.
As an online gambling operator taking card payments, Kindred is required to comply with the Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard, or PCI DSS for short.
Next to complying with all security measures mandated by the payment card industry, we also comply with all market-specific & EU standard regulations.
Taking the ‘outside-in’ approach into how the ‘Pay & Withdraw’ experience operates, means preventing any potential issue, as part of a complex payment ecosystem, to occur in the first place. But in the event of something going wrong, our imperative is to be fully transparent towards our customers and to resolve the issue as fast as we can. Being able to work with several payment providers in any single market allows us to mitigate payment issues by redirecting our customers to the best payment method or route at any point in time.
Staying relevant: what does this mean for the ‘Pay & Withdraw’ Experience?
Recent research into how consumers use online payment methods has shown that there are four factors at play when choosing and trusting a payment method:
- Reputation
- Security
- Familiarity
- Ease of use
As a result of the emerging technological innovations that are transforming payments, the ease of using payment solutions has been greatly improved, without compromising the other three factors described above. Examples of innovative payment solutions such as Swish, Mobilepay or Applepay are all helping Kindred to deliver extremely smooth payment journeys and therefore delight customers. Those payment methods can either be very local or very global. Staying relevant to our customers simply means offering payment methods that our customers prefer, be it local or global, and finding this right mix is a goal we’re continually pursuing.
There are also examples of legal frameworks that drive the payment evolution forward. On the back of new EU directives being recently rolled out, bank monopolies are getting challenged and more innovative Fintech companies are now able to build services on top of existing financial backbone services. These innovative technologies can help facilitate the required mandatory process of identifying and verifying the identity of our customers when opening an account with us. As part of our several mandatory obligations to verify the identity of our customers, Kindred needs to make sure that the bank account we are transferring winnings into effectively belongs to the registered customer at Kindred. For that specific purpose and with the help of open banking rules coming into force, Kindred can request customers to give their consent to collect their account details from the customer bank, with the aim of authenticating the bank account holder instantly and in accordance to the bank security mechanisms. Once this process is completed, further pay-outs to the customer bank account can be performed without the subsequent need for further authentication, hence improving the experience.
Speed: Customers raised expectations
Speed as part of the ‘Pay & Withdraw’ experience does not only imply that the cashier needs to load fast and in a responsive fashion. We need to deliver on speed across all interactions taking place between the customer bank account or card and the Kindred account and vice versa. Accomplishing this speed requires an efficient Kindred process as well as using high-speed banking backbone services.
The general drive for cash-less societies and the technologies emerging from these needs are helping Kindred to deliver a faster experience. Also, increasing cashless environments are raising customers’ expectations of fast payments across both the Pay & Withdraw journeys. Over the years, we’ve had one recurrent question from our customers: “The deposits are instant, why is my withdrawal taking so much time?”. With the help of new technologies and financial services, Kindred is today offering near real-time pay-outs in most of our markets.
Once you have instant processing, you also need the supporting processes to be as fast as possible. An example of this is when you are combining registration, account authentication and deposit into one single instant sign up to create what is commonly referred to as a ‘Pay & Play’ journey, something Kindred is currently testing with the recent launch of a pure ‘Pay & Play’ brand (I.e: Otto Kasino) in Finland. Whenever possible, we also use both deposit & withdraw processes to support our customer authentication obligations, which makes those journeys frictionless and diminishes the risks of the journeys been broken. One concrete example of this is Swish mobile payment solution that allows us to reconcile the customer’s social security number (i.e: SSN) with his/her bank account and, as a result, improves the authentication journey.
Ways of working, results so far and the road ahead
Payments have historically been an area which Kindred excels at, with customer satisfaction scores (i.e: CSAT) being measured systematically since 2014 and showing the highest scores around circa 90%. But keeping up with the competition, the fast-moving area of financial technology and increasing customer’s expectations, is a continuous challenge.
Since 2019, payments have been governed as one of Kindred seven main experiences. This new and innovative organisational set up allows us to embed into the experience several functional and support areas such as Customer Analytics, UX research, Web Analytics, Data, etc., that all contribute to a better understanding of our customers. Having a robust customer experience measurement framework in place for the ‘Pay & Withdraw’ experience, is also key to understanding whether we’re improving the quality of the experience or not.
With the transformation having launched last year, the new model has already delivered some promising results.
The below example relates to the recent launch of Swish withdrawals in Sweden. This specific example shows how the specific CSAT score that measures the customer’s perception of the speed of withdrawals improved in Q3 when the Swish pay-out solution was launched.
As the above graph shows, the recent introduction of Swish as a withdrawal method increased the customer perception of withdrawals being fast by almost 10 points.
Since 2015, we’ve also been working to rebuild the Kindred payment ecosystem entirely as a microservice oriented environment, with this task due to be completed this year. This will give us the speed and agility to tackle future challenges and continue to implement new opportunities.
Payments need to be a well-oiled machine in order to deliver the best experience according to the three experience principles described above: Relevancy, Speed & Trust.
Finally, it is with great content that I can write here that all people involved in the ‘Pay & Withdraw’ experience at Kindred are feeling a strong sense of ownership and pride in delivering a great experience to our customers.
