Value-Added Services: The Cherry on Top of the Sale

You’ve read about the importance of offering an amazing customer experience to drive sales, develop a solid customer base and remain competitive. For this reason, we are not going to dive into “10 reasons why you should have a great customer experience” or “5 ways you can offer the best customer experience”. Instead, we will be sharing one simple cheat to offering an amazing customer experience, at no cost to your business. The “cheat” is the Transaction Junction Value-Added Services (VAS) offering.

We say “cheat” because our customers can offer this at no cost from us, and with no additional efforts. We are happy to offer this free of charge and can implement VAS at a client’s Point of Sale from day one.

Whilst “free” usually comes at a cost of reliability; with us, we ensure that all our services have a signature of quality. We process far more VAS transactions than any other payment processor in South Africa with over 100 million VAS transactions processed each month.

Some Value-Added Services include products such as data, airtime, electricity, vouchers, and tokens. Businesses can add these products alongside their regular products, adding enormous value (hence: Value-Added Services) to both their customers and themselves.

Charging clients a fee to enable Value-Added Services along with a transactional fee is common among FinTechs, including many of our competitors. We offer this for free as a way of adding the cherry on top of our customers’ experience, so that they can add the cherry on top of their customers’ experience. Essentially, we look after our customers so that they can look after theirs.

Our integrated payment clients are not just able to sell VAS alongside their products. They can also automatically reward their customers with VAS at the point of sale to thank them for their purchase. We enable automatic VAS rewards if predetermined conditions are met. For instance, a business could gift customers R10 airtime (from the provider of their choice) if the customer is the 100^th shopper for the day. Feeling rewarded for their patronage, customers are more likely to return.

For businesses continuously looking to improve the customer experience, rewarding customers for their purchases with Value-Added Services is the perfect way to ensure a customer ends up leaving the store smiling.

VAS products, such as airtime and data are products that merchants can expect consumers to buy on a weekly or monthly basis. Because products such as airtime and data can be purchased directly at the point of sale, this allows merchants to up-sell when customers are paying for their items. There will never be a question of whether customers will buy these products – they are a given sale and are all growing in purchasing volume year-on-year.

Essentially, with each VAS sale, the retailer will earn a profit.

Value-Added Services can be used to capitalize on consumer trends as well. For instance, the increasing interest in subscription-based streaming services such as Netflix and Spotify amongst South Africans is a resource that can be harnessed by local businesses.

While selling airtime and data is a great way to serve any South African customer, the popular products such as Netflix, Spotify, Xbox and PlayStation can attract growing segmented consumer groups. Netflix, for instance, has seen an increase of 668% from 2016 to 2020 amongst South African consumers.

There are many more examples of how businesses enhance the customer experience of their customers by selling VAS. You can attract movie enthusiasts with VAS in the form of Netflix or Showmax vouchers. You could also attract the musically inclined with Spotify vouchers, and for constant commuters, you can offer Uber vouchers. These also make for great gifting options and are a way to introduce people to these products.

Some key statistics affecting VAS sales in SA:

• 72% of households use prepaid electricity
• The average South African spends R181 on airtime and data per month
• 38% of South Africans prefer to purchase Value-Added Services at the POS in a retail store
• 42% of South Africans choose to purchase airtime and data at the POS in a retail store
• Smartphone usage has increased from 44% in 2016 to 91% in 2019

Shoppers are more likely to spend money on your products or services as opposed to those of your competitors when you offer VAS. If there is one thing we know about South African shoppers, it is that they switch between brands to find the business that provides the most convenience to their lives.

We can also guarantee that nearly every South African uses at least one of the VAS products our merchants have at their disposal.

We provide Transpector as a standard to all clients using our services for integrated payment. The purpose of Transpector is to offer an easy and uncomplicated means through which our clients can manage their transactional information and accounting requirements. Inclusive of an interface involving detailed charts and tables, this programme gives our merchants a comprehensive view of their businesses’ transaction data. Using Transpector, merchants can also filter through their transactional information to find exactly what they are looking for.

Transaction Junction (TJ) focuses on the digital payments journey, using technology and innovation to enhance the overall customer experience. TJ is a business-enablement transaction platform that delivers digital payment solutions to suit the needs of businesses across diverse markets, while ensuring that the regulatory requirements are taken care of. TJ provides services that encompass every level of touchpoint in the payment chain, ensuring that payments are delivered at the point of sale (PoS) securely and timeously.

TJ solutions provide retailers with the flexibility they need when it comes to choosing the financial services provider, digital product ranges and end-user devices they require. TJ consistently delivers innovations via the introduction of new technologies, payment types and economies of scale, all positively influencing the integrity of the overall transaction flow.