The quest to give superior customer experience
Improving Razorpay Settlements one star at a time!
This article is an account of inspiration from Brian Chesky, the founder of Airbnb. He continuously focuses on giving superior customer experience. When the entire hotel industry was stuck at 5-star experience, Brian decided to go above-and-beyond and come up with 6-star, 7-star, 8-star experience.
Taking a leaf out of his book, my team at Razorpay tried to ‘over-imagine’ a payment gateway’s settlement functionality to innovate and give the best customer experience possible.
The basic functionality of a business receiving payments and getting the money in their bank account works. For a long time, businesses used to be happy with the fact that they were realizing their money in a 3 or 4-day cycle. This was the basic 1-star experience.
Next, the businesses needed to get the money on the same day. Quite a few businesses had cash crunch issues or had to repay the credit to their lenders/investors. Hence, they wanted the same-day settlement. This brings us to the next level- the 2-star experience. When we started off with Scheduled Early Settlements, the intent was to give settlements on the same day, probably twice or thrice a day. But only during working days!
So we reduced the cycle from 3 days to the same day. Next target was how to make this more and more instantaneous and hence we launched On-Demand Early Settlements, which probably gave the users the 3-star experience. This enabled the businesses to trigger settlements which hit their bank account within a couple of hours. But again only during working days!
With the quest to remove the last line from the previous two paragraphs (i.e. “but again only during working days”), we built the functionality to support On-Demand Settlements over the non-banking hours i.e. over weekends and holidays. Money reached the bank account almost instantly (literally within a few seconds) during the holidays. A delightful experience indeed for the businesses! The 4-star experience.
Now, the gap was how to make the On-Demand settlements almost instant (settlement time less than 10 seconds) even on banking hours. Yes, that’s the point of this article. Now, businesses who are on Scheduled Same-day Settlements can trigger On-Demand settlements any time of the day, any day of the year and get settlements within a few hours. Hopefully, this will turn out to be a 5-star experience!
Obviously, experience comes at a cost and therefore a nominal fee is charged but the acceptance from thousands of businesses reinforce the value of this experience.
But the next question for me is, what should be the 6-star experience? Have suggestions, let me know. Could do with some ideas. How about you get the settlements even before the payment happens? Interesting? Give us a month to work on this and get back ;)
Till then, go ahead and enable Razorpay Early Settlements from your dashboard and get lightning-fast / instant / express / on-demand (whatever you choose to call it, I am just adding all the keywords for SEO purposes :P) settlements within a few seconds.
