The world of payments is ever-changing, providing plenty of opportunities to learn new things. According to emerchantpay research, 74% of payments professionals in the following verticals – travel, gambling, forex/ CFD, gaming and eCommerce – are excited to learn more about improving their results.
However, statistics highlight that education needs to become a necessity, rather than a nicety. 73% of companies believe that their current performance levels require improvement, suggesting that significant knowledge gaps exist at the moment. There are many ways to improve this situation. Before we talk about the solutions, though, let’s begin by looking at what’s stopping professionals from learning more about payments performance.
What’s stopping businesses from educating their workforce?
Many of these barriers to acquiring knowledge are closely linked to one another. Budget allocation is a sizeable issue; from the 1,000+ people we interviewed, almost a third (31%) claimed that either a lack of budget or cost issues were holding them back. One reason for this could be the misalignment between personal and wider business objectives, which is an issue for all but 14% of businesses in our sample pool.
Better knowledge-sharing is also needed. Across all of the verticals analysed, fewer than 30% would regard how they use data to make better-informed payments decisions as ‘excellent’ or ‘good’. Furthermore, three-quarters of companies feel that leveraging their data more effectively could boost revenue. This is important because while businesses might need to update their technology, they won’t improve unless they know how to analyse their results (and conduct checks on a regular basis).
How can we change these statistics?
To secure a larger budget, building a better business case is vital. To do this, it’s important for teams and board members alike to have aligned objectives. This can be achieved by gathering to discuss these goals on an annual basis. Moreover, cracks in both performance areas and knowledge can be discovered by talking to the relevant professionals within the business. With a bigger budget, it’s possible for companies to not only provide better training but also to upgrade their payment technology.
If getting more money is unattainable, then you should look at where you can make changes to your current budget allocation. You could spend more on educating employees, for example. Providing industry updates on a monthly basis and training refreshers each quarter could be a way to stay within your cash allowance. Other cost-effective ways to provide the knowledge your team members need could be eLearning courses and internal product workshops. These changes would benefit the business as once professionals know how to analyse data and are aware of what’s happening in their industry, they can adapt to and predict changes with better efficiency.
Conclusion
Budgeting issues are the main barrier for many businesses who would like to improve their employees’ payment-related knowledge. The good news, however, is that changing things is far from a lost cause. Having linked company and individual objectives would be helpful since there would be better clarity across the business. If it isn’t possible to secure more financial assistance, then assessing current priorities will help to free up some money for educating employees. Smart planning will help businesses to offer to teach team members about payment performance. In turn, this will better equip them to tackle related issues and sustain long-term growth in this field.
As part of emerchantpay’s offerings, our team can provide a range of tips for improving payments performance. Contact us to learn more.