Customer Experience Exclusion

Whilst customer inclusion is rightly seen as a desired outcome for businesses, it is also important to recognise and address customer exclusion, wherever and whenever it occurs.

One area where customer exclusion is an ever-increasing possibility is in payments for goods and services. Here Australians are seeing an ongoing paradox in the use of cash. Cash as a means of payment is in a decline as merchants who used to accept cash are increasingly preferring ‘digital’ payments by card, mobile or online. At the same time, cash is becoming increasingly more difficult for consumers to access, with the number of ATMs deployed in Australia falling to a 16-year low by June 2022, to just over 25K. Bank branch numbers have also declined, particularly in regional areas where bank branch opening hours have in some instances also been reduced.

Yet, paradoxically cash as a store of wealth continues to have a strong attraction for many Australians. The Reserve Bank of Australia’s statistics at the end of August 2022, showed a value of over A$102 Billion in banknotes on issue. However, in reality, less than A$10 Billion is believed to be actually in circulation as a means of payment. It should not be surprising then to learn, that $50 and $100 notes make up 94% of the value of the notes on issue, as many consumers use them as a form of offline savings.

The momentum toward a Cashless Society may then become a self-fulfilling prophecy, with cash availability continuing to be reduced and fewer merchants willing to accept cash, thereby creating fewer opportunities to spend cash. Yet cash still has its own Triple A of attraction; It is Accepted nearly everywhere: it is both Authentic (and hence requires no Authorisation – another attractive A), and it is Anonymous.

These Triple A attractions are particularly important to certain groups in our society and the diminishing availability and useability of cash could threaten their exclusion from many marketplaces and experiences. Vulnerable groups include the elderly; those who live in remote areas; those on low incomes or paid in cash; the disabled; recent migrants and those whom for whatever reasons rely on ‘carers’ to do their shopping for them. As an example there are an estimated 2.5 million Australians who have either no or irregular access to the internet, and therefore may be excluded from using digital payments.

Recent research (March 2022) conducted in the United Kingdom by the Royal Society for Arts, Manufactures and Commerce (RSA), surveyed over 3,000 people to better understand their attitudes and behaviours towards cash. This data was used to describe five segments, four of which still use cash to some degree:

• Cash dependents: An older segment that has a strong preference for cash
• Cash keepers: A younger segment that likes the security of having cash
• Cashless sceptics: The oldest segment whose scepticism about a cashless society runs deep
• Cash occasional: A younger segment that prefers to manage their money digitally but uses cash occasionally or in emergencies e.g. floods; fires; telecoms/I.T. ‘outages’
• Cashless converts: A segment that strongly prefers digital payments and does not see many benefits to cash

As attitudes toward using cash as a means of payment may well differ, the concept of inclusivity should be very much at the forefront of our thoughts regarding Customer Experience. So while the prospect of a Cashless Society holds many appeals, we also need to be alert to the concept of exclusivity and what that means in terms of the Customer Experience for those members of society for whom cash is still an attractive, and even necessary, method of payment.

Professor Steve Worthington

澳大利亚斯威本科技大学

Customer Experience & Insight (CXI) Research Group

9/9/2022