Not all platforms are created equally, and not all are CRMs targeted specifically towards the payments industry. Selecting the right tool for the unique challenges your ISO faces is key, but with the right CRM software underpinning your operations, organization-wide improvements in productivity and work-quality can be unlocked with relative ease.
A customer resource management platform is software designed specifically to streamline and enhance your sales and service-delivery processes through better data management, and through integration with your company’s other customer-facing operations.
Effectively, a CRM is designed to bring all of your customer-facing activities – from initial prospecting to the sales process, to ongoing service and support, to payment, and more – into a single, centralized point of control.
That accomplishes two primary goals of CRM:
- Providing your team with better access to the crucial customer data they need to close more deals and offer elevated service.
- Minimizing the number of platforms, tools, and logins your team needs to juggle so they can spend more time on their jobs and less time fumbling with systems.
How a CRM Improves Merchant Acquisition
From the ISO standpoint, the primary function of your CRM is to help your team bring in a higher volume of higher-quality merchants.
The first step in that process is improved lead management. Leading CRM platforms include advanced lead management suites designed to make the collection, storage, and use of leads easier, faster, and more effective.
In the case of IRIS CRM, the lead management tools enable users to both create new leads and access existing leads within a matter of a few clicks from anywhere inside the system. Leads can be quickly created or imported manually, or, the system can generate new lead profiles automatically from web inquiries, telephone calls received trough the power dialer, text messages, and more.
Once a new lead profile has been created, the system makes constant and automated tracking and updating of lead data the priority. Every single lead interaction is automatically logged and every new document automatically attached, ensuring your agents will always have complete customer information to work with when moving a merchant through the recruitment process.
The result is that your team can not only ensure hot leads don’t slip through the cracks, but they can also deliver a better, more personalized, and more efficient sales process as well.
How CRM Software Improves Merchant Service and Support
Once a new merchant is signed, your CRM continues to deliver significant value by improving your ability to deliver ongoing service. Happy merchants are the key to consistent residuals growth, because not only can unhappy ones defect to competitors, but unhappy and underperforming merchants also just don’t earn as much.
Your CRM helps ensure merchant performance by providing your team with an ongoing, real-time view of the health and success of each and every merchant in your roster. At a glance, you can stay informed on your top-performing merchants for any given period, which merchants have ceased processing transactions, which merchants are struggling with disputes or other issues, and more. With advanced systems like IRIS CRM, you can even offer real-time dispute notification and management, ensuring your merchants can fight chargebacks more effectively – protecting their revenue and yours.
IRIS CRM also offers a fully white-labeled support portal that enables you to provide your merchants with online access to certain functions of the CRM, fully skinned with your ISOs branding. That not only provides a value-added source of data to your clients, it also provides a low-friction and low-maintenance way of ensuring an ongoing and open line of communication – a key to maintaining a strong long-term relationship.
How Can CRM Software Improve Management
The value offered by CRM tools crosses all industries, but payments-specific CRM software offer some key additional benefits to ISOs by addressing specific problems that are unique to this industry.
Among those problems is the mass of data that you receive each month from your payment processing partners. Wrangling the reporting from a half dozen or more different processors, each with their own unique formatting and layout, is a time-consuming and headache-inducing challenge. A good ISO CRM will enable you to automatically combine the data from those various reports into one, easy-to-use reporting dashboard. That synthesis of data frees up hours of time and makes it easier to draw useful business intelligence from your merchant and portfolio-level data. It also revolutionizes how you handle your residuals.
Not only does a good CRM provide you with a clearer high-level view of your residuals and portfolio health, systems like IRIS CRM also make calculating your monthly residuals and paying out your splits a task that takes minutes, rather than hours.
In IRIS CRM, the splits for each of your merchants are stored in the system, and when residuals numbers arrive each month, those splits are automatically applied, providing you with an accurate payout amount without the need for any manual calculation or clunky data wrangling. Payouts can even be issued directly through the CRM, ensuring your agents get paid faster – a big selling point when recruiting top talent.
If you’d like to find out more about how customer resource management can help your ISO improve everything from merchant acquisition to residuals calculations and beyond, visit IRISCRM.com to check out everything the platform has to offer. If you’d like to see the CRM in action, schedule a free guided demonstration today!