A merchant services CRM is a mission-critical piece of software for all modern ISOs looking to outcompete and outperform the rest of an extremely competitive industry. The core of any merchant services CRM is its suite of sales tools – lead management and sales process delivery tools that help your ISO find better leads and your agents close more deals. But top merchant services CRMs also offer a variety of features beyond sales tools that can provide enormous value to your ISO, and choosing a system with the right features is key to maximizing your ROI. The following is a quick look at a few of the most valuable features available from some top CRMs, and how each can benefit your ISO. 

 

Automated Merchant Onboarding:

Onboarding new merchants to your payment processing partners is one of the most important and most consistent tasks your ISO performs. Unfortunately, it’s also likely one of your most time-consuming tasks as well. And manually transferring data from a merchant’s MPA into a processor’s boarding system isn’t just slow and tedious either; it’s also extremely prone to human errors, which can delay or derail applications, and even the smallest typo has the potential to cost you money. 

Automated onboarding systems – like IRIS CRM’s TurboApp – change all that by pulling the key data from a digital MPA and using it to automatically build out an application that can be sent off to top processors in a matter of minutes. By automatically configuring itself to match the required fields from the selected processor and filling each out automatically, the system eliminates both the wasted time and the human error that plagues onboarding. Operations staff or even agents can simply import an MPA, review the details in TurboApp, set pricing, and submit everything in as little as five minutes, significantly increasing capacity and boosting success rates. 

 

Automatic Residuals Calculations:

When residuals drop each month, two things happen: first, managers are bogged down in a mountain of different processor reports that need to be merged so residuals can be calculated, one-by-one. Second, agents begin watching the clock eagerly awaiting payouts on their splits – payouts that could easily take a week or more to arrive based on the complexity of the calculations. 

A good merchant services CRM will ease the burden of the residuals cycle by taking the calculations off management’s plate altogether. Instead, when residuals reports hit the CRM each month, the splits can be automatically applied and agent payouts determined – to the penny – within seconds. In the case of a merchant services CRM like IRIS CRM, those payouts can then also be made right through the system using a built-in ACH payments module. The result is that your ISO’s team can spend less time wrangling residuals reports and more time on revenue-generating activities. Your agents also get paid out much faster, which reinforces loyalty and helps you compete for the top talent in the industry. 

 

Private-Label Helpdesk Integration:

Merchants are at the heart of your ISO’s revenues, and the better you can serve them – especially your top performers – the stronger your residuals will be and the faster your portfolio will grow. With even the smallest ISOs managing potentially hundreds of merchants, keeping track of the needs of each can be a challenge, and it can be easy for merchants to feel forgotten or underserved. 

Your merchant services CRM should help you deal with the challenge of managing merchants by providing a built-in help desk system with an online merchant portal that your clients can access 24/7. An online help portal not only ensures merchants feel like they can access you at any time, even when your team isn’t actually at work, but it also ensures that support requests that come in – both during and after business hours – are accurately tracked through completion. Private labeling allows you to wrap your portal with your own branding, reinforcing your relationship with your merchants and ensuring a support experience that feels cohesive and seamless.

 

In-Depth and At-A-Glance Reporting:

With hundreds of merchants spread across half a dozen or more processors, keeping track of your ISO’s operations and performance can be difficult. Each processor provides their own reports each month with distinct formatting and pages upon pages of data which, in isolation, only tells one part of the story. As a result, creating a unified picture of your ISO’s operations can be a time-consuming headache. 

Reporting and analytics are one area in which top merchant services CRMs like IRIS CRM excel, and the ability to automatically consolidate your reporting and make it available in an easily digestible format can’t be overvalued. A good merchant services CRM will combine your reporting into a single dashboard that allows you to quickly and easily find the information you need to make great decisions at the organization-wide, processor, or merchant levels. You’ll be able to track top merchants at a glance, identify merchants that have stopped processing payments, examine sales and profitability data, and much more. Filtering by date, group, and other categories ensures you’ll always be able to find what you need without being bogged down by what you don’t. If knowledge is power, a good merchant services CRM might be one of the most valuable tools available to your ISO. 

IRIS CRM is one of the payments industry’s top merchant services CRMs, including all of the features discussed here and many more. For more information on everything the platform can do for your ISO, reach out to a member of the team or schedule your free guided demonstration of IRIS CRM today.