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Are You Getting the Best Service from your Payments Provider?

by Jessica Weisman-Pitts
iStock 13127659092

By Penny Townsend, Co-Founder and Chief Product Officer, Qualpay

Every business understands the importance of maintaining and receiving exceptional service, starting with excellent customer service, which creates essential value to your company and product while helping you to retain customers. On the other hand, bad customer service is proven to alienate customers. Studies show that half of US customers have abandoned an intended purchase on account of receiving poor service.

An essential part of enabling your customers to receive the best initial service possible is ensuring that when they use a credit card, digital wallet or bank account to purchase, their experience is fast, simple, and safe. That’s why you need to choose the right payments service provider for your business. In other words, it means selecting a provider that delivers an effective and efficient service to support you, so in turn, you support your customers’ wants and demands.

But just as importantly, it means picking a provider ready to help YOU with

1) all the issues and concerns you have, and

2) being there right away for you when there is a problem.

You deserve the same customer support you give your customers.

When selecting a payments provider, you should look for one with a fully-staffed support team of technical experts who can answer all your questions and fulfill requests.

Look for a vendor that supports you, the way you support your customers by offering chat, telephone, and email support, as well as an interactive knowledge base. A team ready to talk or chat with you, providing the human touch.

It would help if you also didn’t have to talk to a robot. Nor should you have to hold for too long to speak to a customer service representative.

Your inquiries and concerns should be met with a high degree of urgency and resolved quickly and painlessly. Because your business matters.

Go with a payments provider who is with you from the get-go.

You deserve a payments provider who is willing to demonstrate right from the very beginning that they are 100% prepared to do what they can to help you and your business. That starts with the application process itself. Make sure your needs are addressed first and foremost as soon as you sign-up for an account.

Request a statement analysis to discover exactly what you are paying compared with the offered price. This analysis should be free and come with no obligations. It may entail a cost comparison using your current statements and an audit of the interchange rates you are paying. But through this process, you should be able to learn not only what you will be paying but also that you are qualifying for the best rate possible.

The attention and care you receive at the very beginning of your relationship with your payments provider often says a lot about how you two will be conducting business in the months and, hopefully, years to come. This is the exact time to find out whether the payments provider you select has what it takes to meet your specific business requirements both now and in the future.

Look for a fully-integrated payments provider.

It takes many moving parts to make credit card purchases possible, from the merchant account to the payment gateway to the acquiring bank to the credit card brands themselves. One of the significant advantages of using a payments provider that integrates most aspects of the payments process is quickly pinpointing an issue or problem and then developing and implementing a solution. This not only saves you time, but it also helps save potential lost sales. What’s more, it reduces the extra cost of involving multiple vendors in analyzing what may be wrong and fixing it.

A payments provider who is there for you with fast answers is an essential aspect of the quality customer service you want.

Keeping you informed and up to date is good service too.

Once you become the customer of a particular payments provider, that provider should offer you valuable resources to help you get the most out of your payments system.

This includes email updates from the provider about improvements to their platform or the introduction of new rules from the credit card industry that will affect how you process payments and the fees you may pay. See too if the payments provider has an online resource center to look up and answer questions you have about payments.

The point is a payments provider should be willing to do all it can to help you by offering such ongoing support. And just as important, this ongoing support should be free. It’s another part of what makes for excellent customer service.

Going above and beyond for you so you can go above and beyond for your customers.

In the end, you want a payments processing provider that is totally in your corner. That gives you the time and energy to be totally in your own customer’s corner.

About the author:

Penny Townsend serves as Chief Product Officer at Qualpay, a company which she Co-founded in 2014. With over twenty years of executive experience in the payments industry, Penny leads Qualpay’s business, marketing, product and operations strategies. A frequent speaker at industry events, Penny is passionate about empowering women and minorities, particularly in the payments industry and product management roles. Penny holds an MBA in E-Commerce and Telecommunications from the University of San Francisco.

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