“Money is only a tool. It will take you wherever you wish, but it will not replace you as the driver.” —Ayn Rand
Introduction
Zoho Creator has the default option of creating a payment workflow within the application. It is allows us to do on the fly payment method for the records added.
This forces the customer to use it only at the time of data entry of the forms/updates in reports.
This is not viable in some scenarios. Let us take the below use case.
Use Case
Let us say that you are having a service where a customer can call you and book an appointment for a particular service. For this, a payment to be charged to the customer.
In order to have a better customer experience and service, the options have to be flexible.
You would like to give an option to the customer to make payment anytime before 24 hours of the booked/confirmed appointment time.
In this scenario, the payment method used in Zoho Creator will have a disadvantage due to
1. The payment insists on paying the payment on the fly/immediate.
2. The customer must have an account to login for payment. (Customer Portal)
3. The delayed payment cannot be done in the payment workflow.
Below is the sample workflow design of the payment in Zoho Creator
Solution
One of the solutions for this will be triggering the payment gateway whenever an appointment is booked.
The app has to raise an invoice to the customer with the payment link attached in an email as well as SMS/text to the customer.
Using the payment link, the customer will be able to pay for the appointment booked.
Typical Application Flow
In this application we can see that a customer calls the Agent for booking an appointment.
Once the appointment is made the agent fills in the amount to be paid by the customer along with the due date and triggers the payment to the payment gateway.
The payment gateway creates an E-invoice with the payment link for the customer and sends the link to the customer via email and SMS.
The customer will be able to pay by using the link sent by the payment gateway.
When the payment is done by the customer the status of the invoice is updated in the payment gateway. By proper API integration with the payment gateway, the real time status of the invoice can be updated in the Zoho Creator Application. This will be very handy where a small organization handles the accounting and front desk with limited resources.
Conclusion
Thus this type of payment integration in the App lets you have the freedom of not relying on the payment on the fly method. Moreover, it also gives the peace of mind to the customer on the payment front. Definitely, this increases your customer experience and customer service value without much hassles.