Background
SmoothPay is a mobile payment and loyalty application catering to small- and medium-sized businesses. The app has numerous partnerships with cafes, quick-serve restaurants, and retailers in high population urban areas. The app is integrated with Visa, MasterCard, Amex, Visa Debit, and PayPal payment systems, allowing users to pay for items and services in their preferred manner. Although the app is integrated with the payment systems and helps track customer discounts, it can benefit from including more personal finance-related features that will allow the users to track their finances and spending habits. Hypothetically, the addition of new features will translate into SmoothPay becoming users’ favored mobile payment and budgeting app.
Recommendation
It is recommended to include several features to improve user experience and broaden the existing user base:
- SmoothPay should provide a feature for the integration of reward cards and documents qualifying the user for discounts, for example, student discounts.
- The application should incorporate a budgeting feature, allowing the customers to automatically track their expenses, with reports on spending habits automatically created.
- The company is recommended to partner with public transport and other transportation companies and delivery services.
- SmoothPay is advised to offer a variety of loyalty discounts to users, depending on their use of the application.
Basis for Recommendation
- The application already incorporates loyalty discounts but fails to account for other discounts users may hold. Thus, it is crucial to allow users to integrate their personal discounts, such as student or disability discounts, into the SmoothPay application to boost user experience.
- The budgeting feature will allow users to track their spending from multiple accounts, with all purchases being recorded automatically. The application allows users to pay using several payment systems but fails to show the current balance before a purchase is made. Thus, the feature is beneficial for the users who have multiple accounts and cards connected to SmoothPay as it will show the current balance of all accounts and purchases made from them.
- SmoothPay has an established customer base in densely populated urban areas. Therefore, it would be beneficial to arrange for payment via the SmoothPay app for other services popular in metropolitan areas, such as delivery and transportation.
- The application offers new users a $5 credit on sign-up. In order to encourage new users to sign up, a loyalty discount from the app should be offered. For example, a permanent 1% discount on each purchase can be offered to new users to encourage them to favor vendors that accept SmoothPay. The percentage can be increased further after a year of application use.
Discussion
These recommendations will require the company to negotiate new partnerships with transportation and delivery companies and develop a new version of the application to integrate users’ individual discounts and the budgeting feature. The app’s loyalty discounts should also be negotiated with the partners to establish and agree upon the appropriate percentage. There are several risks to the implementation of the proposed recommendations, including failure to negotiate loyalty discounts and new partnerships as well as technical difficulties during the integration of new features.
Next Steps
Upon the approval of the discussed recommendations, a team of developers should be assembled to create a new version of the application, including the aforementioned new features. Four months should be allowed to create the beta version of the app, with the following two to three months of testing. During this time, new partners need to be approached, with all partnerships secured within 6-7 months, before the new app version is released. Loyalty discounts should be negotiated and agreed upon with the existing partners before distributing the new version to users.