As we gear up for the busiest time of year for shops, restaurants, and businesses alike, it’s essential for merchants to prepare for the anticipated surge in traffic – thoughtful planning will ensure a smooth experience this Black November and Festive season.
TOP PAYMENT TIPS
Ready. Steady. Go!
- Check your payment terminals: Ensure all your payment terminals are functioning perfectly. Consider ordering extra devices to handle increased sales and provide peace of mind with backup options.
- Implement a mobile payment strategy: Use mobile systems to accept payments anywhere. Explore SoftPOS for a quick-to-market, flexible, and cost-effective way to accept contactless payments on an Android device.
- Adapt to today’s consumers: Embrace alternative payment methods to meet diverse customer preferences and eliminate payment barriers. Options like QR payment apps, Buy Now Pay Later (BNPL), online vouchers, and mobile wallets are only becoming more popular.
- Optimise your setup: Review your current setup to ensure a stable internet connection and that all hardware and software—from POS to payment and beyond—are functioning at their best.
- Monitor post-transaction data: Get familiar with your post-transaction services, especially reconciliation. Regularly check your reconciliation page for visibility on what has been sold versus what has settled – it is important you are settled correctly down to the last cent.
- Ensure payment security: If your payment processor isn’t fully PCI P2PE validated, yesterday is the time to reassess. With cyber threats on the rise, safeguarding sensitive card information is crucial. Transaction Junction offers a fully P2PE validated platform, ensuring the highest level of payment security.
- Evaluate payment processing fees: Evaluate the overall costs – does your payment processor have a complex fee structure, charge transaction fees with varying fees per payment provider, making it difficult to predict your expenses? Time to re-evaluate. Get a quote.
Your peace of mind matters
At Transaction Junction, we’ve conducted extensive capacity planning to ensure our environment is ready to handle the anticipated increase in transaction volume.
End of year freeze period
To ensure 100% platform stability this festive season, we are implementing our end-of-year freeze from 22 November 2024 – 15 January 2025.
During the freeze window, only critical and/or emergency changes will be considered. Day-to-day business process operations will continue as per usual – some of these include the loading of new stores/lanes, store ownership changes, as well as store/lane changes.
Capacity and stability
To deal with the growing and ever-present risk of cyber-attacks and the risks associated with data compromises, we are pleased to inform you that all 2024-mandated changes have been implemented.
Our monitoring teams and support environments have also instituted several process improvements to enhance the proactive monitoring capacity across all avenues of service.
Monitoring
Transaction Junction’s monitoring teams operate 24 hours over the entire year, ensuring that any system or provider anomalies are escalated and responded to in the fastest time possible. Application-level alerting and platform notifications have been further enhanced to enhance the proactive monitoring of all service critical environments.
This year, we implemented AI Ops monitoring across our transaction channels to analyse real-time response codes for all customer interactions. By leveraging AI to assess historical trends, we enable the detection of granular anomalies across channels, regardless of customer profile. This has improved MTTR and enhances service delivery in real-time (watch our social media spaces for more!).
Customer support
A reminder that our Support team is available 24 hours a day, 365 days per year. Escalation processes are shared with all customers over email. Our first line support details remain the same: support@switch.tj and +27 86 111 4958.
Let’s make this season a success together
We would like to take this opportunity to thank our customers for their loyal and continued support and assure them of our unwavering commitment to service excellence.