In the electronic payments space, competition for merchants is fierce, and ISOs often earn fractions of a penny on each transaction they facilitate. Yet, despite those tough conditions, opportunity abounds for ISOs able to find new ways to compete and operate more efficiently. Arguably the best tool available to help ISOs do that is a good customer resource management (CRM) system. Payments CRMs are designed specifically to apply the many benefits of customer resource management to the specific needs of ISOs and payment facilitators, and adopting one can help your ISO improve everything from your recruiting, to your ongoing service, to your residuals management, to your onboarding, and more. 

 

Improve Your ISO’s Merchant Acquisition Efficiency 

At their core, all CRMs are sales tools, including payment processing CRMs. The right system can dramatically improve your merchant acquisition and sales efficiency by enabling you to leverage advanced automation alongside the huge wealth of stored customer data your operations generate. 

For instance, lead collection is often either a slow, frustrating process or an extremely expensive one for ISOs that just buy their leads. With the right payments CRM, new leads can be collected and imported into the system automatically from sources ranging from website forms to inbound emails, text messages, and phone calls. Not only will your ISO’s funnel be more full, but it’ll be totally organic and require almost no manual intervention, freeing up both time and money. 

The number of ways a payments CRM can streamline your merchant recruiting activities goes far beyond lead collection, covering almost all aspects of the sales process. Perhaps most importantly of all, a payments CRM makes it faster and easier to build strong relationships with prospective merchants and provide them with more personalized service – two keys to beating the field in a competitive industry like payments. 

 

Improve Your ISO’s Service and Support Efficiency

Once you’ve signed a merchant, they only generate revenue as long as they stick around. With a sea of hungry competitors always ready to poach your clients, keeping your merchants happy and their businesses healthy should be a top priority. 

A payments CRM can make providing elite service and support far more efficient by centralizing the information you need and automating many parts of the support process. For example, IRIS CRM comes with a built-in private label merchant support portal that gives your clients a fast, easy way to access your support team online, even when business hours are over. Once a support request has been submitted, the system uses automation to ensure it gets to the right person, everyone involved is notified of all changes, and a resolution can be reached as quickly as possible. 

The data a payments CRM provides on merchants is also extremely useful for improving support. By automatically alerting your ISO to key events like a merchant’s transactions falling below certain levels or a dispute coming in, your team can proactively stay on top of things, ensuring merchants who need assistance get it, your top performers get the attention they deserve, and overly troublesome merchants can be dropped before things get out of hand. 

 

Improve Your ISO’s Residuals Management Efficiency

Residuals are what the ISO game is all about, but they’re also a huge pain to deal with due to their complexity. Once per month, half a dozen or more disparate reports come in from your processing partners, requiring you to combine the most important data manually, figure out what you’ve earned as a whole, and crunch the numbers on how much you need to pay your independent agents. 

With a good payments CRM, that entire process becomes effectively instantaneous. When processor residual reports hit the CRM, they’re automatically combined in the analytics dashboard, enabling users to find the exact information they need – on a processor or portfolio-wide level – without having to sift through a ton of data or do any manual calculations. Splits are also automatically calculated down to the penny, enabling payments to be sent out faster – a great way to maintain loyal, happy agents. 

 

Improve Your ISO’s Onboarding Efficiency

Boarding new merchants is not only one of the most important tasks your ISO performs, it’s also one of the most common. Unfortunately, the traditional onboarding process can easily take 30 minutes or more, even for trained operations staff who do it all the time. It’s also error-prone, potentially leading to unnecessary rework or even failed applications.

IRIS CRM, the industry’s top payments CRM, comes with an automated boarding tool called TurboApp that is designed specifically to eliminate the woes of slow, error-prone onboarding. With TurboApp, your merchants fill out their MPAs digitally, and those digital forms can be imported directly into the application. TurboApp then preconfigures itself to match the requirements of the selected processor and automatically fills out all the relevant fields using the information in the MPA. Rather than spending 30 minutes manually transferring data from one place to another, your staff can simply review the information, set pricing, and submit – all in five minutes or less. In some cases, applications can even be submitted instantly using IRIS CRM’s new one-click web-based onboarding tool. 

Efficiency is important to all businesses, but in payments, where competition is tight and margins even tighter, the ability to efficiently attract, sign, and serve new merchants is absolutely crucial to your ISO’s success. There is no better tool to help you in the pursuit of more streamlined, cost-effective, and efficient operations than a payments CRM. 

 

To find out more about everything a top payments CRM can do for your ISO, click here now to schedule a free guided demonstration of IRIS CRM.