Many Mobile Users Don’t Care About Mobile Payments–Should You?

We’ve heard about a variety of new mobile payment options coming out over the last several months, so it’s not surprising that Harris Interactive set out to conduct a poll to see just how important mobile payments are, or will be, to businesses. What they discovered about mobile payment apps was unsettling.

There are many different varieties of mobile payment systems, some requiring dongles, others depending on near-field communications, and still others using a variety of apps. And while Harris’ poll, taken with 2,000 users, revealed that there was a healthy number of people using mobile payment systems–20 percent of all respondents, in fact–there was an even larger contingent that never had, and determined that the ability to use mobile payments in their devices was “not at all important”. That number? Fully 62 percent of all the respondents in the Harris poll came back with that answer.

Now, here’s the interesting part. The Harris poll was taken among 2,000 respondents, as I mentioned previously. But out of those 2,000 respondents included both smartphone users and regular phone users. Considering that the poll included regular phone users, they almost certainly have never used the service before. Thus, the discovery that many poll respondents wouldn’t use mobile payment systems isn’t surprising. They likely wouldn’t have in the first place.

But what does this mean for your small business? It means that, in considering whether or not to add mobile payments to your repertoire, you’ll want to consider your market. If you have a younger clientele, or one that’s heavily involved with smartphones, then you may want to add some kind of mobile payment system to the options you have for having customers pay for your goods and services. And if your clientele is mainly older, or on the lower end of the tech spectrum, you may not need to be in such a rush.

Naturally, an amenity like mobile payments is useful in terms of making customers happy, but cloud-based telephony tools can also go a long way toward improving the customer service experience. Using things like digital fax receiving and call answering services to keep your customers in contact with you, and happy too.

The decision to add mobile payment systems isn’t an easy one, but when you consider your market fully, you’ll have a much better idea as to whether or not to bring in a mobile payment app to handle at least some business.

Related keywords: cloud based telephony, mobile payment, smartphone, retailing