Freecharge Launches New Features Targeting Small And Medium Business
Freecharge, one of the leading digital platforms for financial services, has launched unique features – Paisa Plus, Payment Links, Dynamic QR, Digital Khata and On-demand Settlement – for small and medium businesses (SMBs) on the Freecharge Business App. These features would help the merchants serve their customers better and increase engagement.
Payment links are an essential and effective way of receiving payments digitally from their consumers or trading partners for the goods or services provided. The COVID-19 pandemic has not only affected daily life but also all the markets and industry sectors globally, enforcing social distancing to become a new norm these days. Freecharge payment link services, here, proves highly advantageous, as it provides a swift and secure way to send and receive payments. Through this product, businesses can send SMS, E-mail or WhatsApp messages to their customers with a link for making the pending payment. The consumer, on receiving the link can pay using UPI, Cards or Netbanking.
Freecharge Paisa Plus enables the SMBs to enhance customer loyalty by allowing small merchants to issue their own digital shopping/gift vouchers to customers either as a reward or at a discounted price. With these vouchers, customers are encouraged to make a purchase in lieu of a discount or a refund. This helps in increasing customer stickiness. Freecharge Khata is a customized digital record book of the good old ‘Khata’, which enables merchant partners to maintain an account of all of their customer transactions. Merchants can easily add customers through a simple mobile verification process. Once verified, they can give credit and make debits in the customer account and can also send automated reminders to customers to settle their pending credit amount. This digitized maintenance of khata ensures total transparency between merchant and consumer by notifying both for each credit and debit. Thus it facilitates a more advanced and collaborative effort for merchants, aiding in better customer management.
On the occasion of the launch, Siddharth Mehta, CEO, Freecharge said, “We are focused at offering unique and smart solutions that not only help in increasing digital transactions, but also offer value to businesses and customers, thereby aid in quicker adoption of the payment platform. In the present scenario when social distancing has set the precedence, such secured modes of payments are eliminating the need of in-person transactions and aiding small businesses continue during uncertain times.”
“We are hopeful that our customers and merchants would continue to have an impeccable experience on the app which would strengthen the merchant and customer relationship. Customer-centricity lies at the core of all what we do at Freecharge and we would continue to explore ways of furthering customer-delight.”
The features launched will help grow the merchant’s business and augment customer loyalty, making disengaged customers engage more and driving repeat purchases. At a click, a merchant can search for all records in a hassle-free digital environment, thus, aids in doing away with maintaining physical records, multiple hard copies and khata entries. The current environment has brought about many challenges thus impacting business sustenance of small retailers, and in order to survive they must rethink their customer needs and business models. Freecharge’s remote payment solution and VAS offering will not only enable them to continue operating their businesses seamlessly but will further create the path for them to gradually adopt to digital. This transformation is here to stay, hence taking the digital leap is the only way forward to stay relevant. Freecharge’s objective, as a part of Axis Bank, is to make itself a comprehensive and open digital financial service platform that can facilitate a suite of offering to its SMB partners enabling them with accessibility and choice of service. By downloading the FC app one can avail all these services in a matter of minutes.
