Archive for the ‘Client Services’ Category

It’s Alive

Thursday, June 16th, 2011

As a result of much hard work, we’ve seen a number of Clients go live in the past few weeks. I’d like to highlight just  a few of these diverse businesses that recently launched on CashBox:

Major League Gaming:  The largest professional video game playing league in the world, Major League Gaming serves 40 million consumers in North America.  Consumers can now purchase passes to various Pro Circuit events as well as MLG Credits to use online. All transactions are powered by CashBox.

Next Issue Media:  The joint venture product of five of the best known publishers in the business, Next Issue Media just released the preview version of their digital storefront on the Android platform, with magazines such as Fortune, TIME, Popular Mechanics, The New Yorker and others available for purchase as subscriptions or single-issue purchases.

Ultimate Guitar:  Ultimate Guitar just launched a premium service that both provides an ad-free environment as well as access to the tabs to all your favorite songs and backing tracks that help you learn a song quickly.

Much kudos goes out to our Client Services team, which does remarkable work, widely under the radar. Beyond assisting these clients with their CashBox implementations, our team spends a lot of time with Clients, sharing best practices, discussing business model trade-offs, and helping them maximize the value of their online services.

We’ve only just begun to scratch the surface of this digital explosion in consumer services, and we will continue to share additional interesting stories about digital leaders launching new services that leverage the power of our CashBox SaaS billing and marketing solutions.

Sanjay SarathyTags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,
Posted by Sanjay Sarathy in Client Services, Marketing Fury, gaming | No Comments »

The Hidden Benefits of Putting Up a Fight

Monday, August 30th, 2010

Online businesses often ask us about the value of fighting chargebacks.  After all, it’s a relatively small percentage of total revenue (less than one percent if you’re following the rules).  There are, however, several reasons to put up a fight that may not be readily apparent.

There’s an old joke about two guys camping.  They hear a bear outside the tent.  One guy starts panicking, while the other calmly puts on his tennis shoes.  The first guys says “what are you thinking?  You can’t outrun a bear!”  The second guy replies “I don’t have to outrun the bear.  I just have to outrun you.”

Your site doesn’t have to be bullet proof, and you don’t want to make it impossible for someone to get their money back.  However, you do want to make your site a less attractive fraud target compared to your peers.  The web is littered with blog entries and Facebook postings of people telling how to scam a particular merchant.  If you are an easy target, people share that information, and others will victimize your business.  If you take a harder line, though, the fraudsters will look for an easier target.

Analysis of your credit card traffic will also show that you may benefit from educating the banks.  Most merchants see that a handful of banks may make up a reasonable percentage of their transactions.  Our analysis shows a drop in chargebacks received from some of these particular banks as merchants fight chargebacks over time.

Over the first year of fighting chargebacks, Vindicia clients see up to a 1/3 reduction in the total chargeback volume they receive.  While some might opt to only fight specific types of chargebacks, we have repeatedly shown that our merchants benefit from aggressively fighting chargebacks across the board.

Doug SmithTags: , ,
Posted by Doug Smith in Best Practices, Client Services, Data Geek, Marketing Fury | 1 Comment »

Sharing is Only for Kids

Monday, August 23rd, 2010

I received an interesting email from Visa recently, and it bears wider dissemmination.  The crux of the message was a reminder that it violates Visa regulations to share card numbers between merchants.  This is probably obvious in some contexts (i.e. if you sell your customer list to another company, you better not pass along their card numbers).  In other cases, though, folks may not realize they’re breaking the rules.

Assume you run an online video service.  You have an affiliate that sells pizza.  They allow someone to buy their pizza, then ask the pizza-buyer if they’d also like to rent a movie online.  If so, they route the user to your site.

So far, so good… but this is also where people get into trouble.  If the affiliate passes in basic information (their affiliate ID, the genre of movie in the advertisement, etc.) that’s OK.  However, the affiliate is explicitly prohibited from passing along the payment information.  Would it be more convenient for the customer if the payment info passed in?  Probably.  However, it’s against the Visa regulations.  It’s also a violation of rules with the FTC, unless you have explicit permission to do so from the customer.

Just a friendly reminder to be careful about passing this sort of information between affiliates.

http://www.paymentsnews.com/2010/04/visa-prohibits-web-merchants-from-passing-along-cardholder-info.html

and

http://www.retailing.org/advanced_consent_marketing_guidelines

Doug SmithTags: , ,
Posted by Doug Smith in Best Practices, Client Services | No Comments »

Secrets to Successful Implementations

Wednesday, July 14th, 2010

If I had a dollar every time I’ve heard “We have to get the project rolling right now.  We’re going to want to go live in <insert irrationally small number here> days,” I would have my own private island.

It’s natural that when companies sign a contract, the exec sponsors want to get things moving quickly.  The decision has been made, and it’s time to get on to reaping the benefits of the best SaaS platform on the market.  Looking across all of our clients, it’s easy to see who will get their implementation up and running first.  The funny thing is, it is actually independent of the size of the client, or how “process oriented” they are.  It comes down to three simple things.

1)       Defined Scope

Clients who get live quickly do so in part because they define a scope and stick to it.  There’s always a new feature to add, something that will make it even more cool, but if you want to get live, you make the conscious choice to save that new feature to phase II.

2)      Focused Resources

If your deployment team is also responsible for the corporate LAN, the CEO’s laptop support, resetting passwords for wayward users, and refilling the coffee pot, well, they’re going to have a hard time focusing on getting the work done.  (OK, a full pot of coffee probably helps, but the CEO is going to have to find the printer on his own!)

3)      Make Decisions Quickly

Even the smallest organizations can get bogged down if they debate simple questions endlessly.  Businesses don’t fail because the background on the offer page was the wrong color.  On the other hand, businesses do fail if you don’t get to market and start generating revenue.  Nominate someone from each of the key functional areas, and give them the authority to make the call.

If you adhere to these simple precepts, the implementation of a best-in-class billing system takes less time than you would imagine.

Doug SmithTags: , , ,
Posted by Doug Smith in Best Practices, Client Services, Payments 101.201.301 | No Comments »

Now Announcing … “Refunds”??

Friday, June 11th, 2010

Building business-critical software is an interesting process. We must understand the core requirements of our prospects and clients, find which additional features will serve the largest number of clients, and predict future requirements. However, no matter how good you are at this process, no software package will meet 100% of every client’s needs. A good sales team must make certain that prospective clients understand where any gaps may lie, and an effective services team must be creative in proposing workable solutions to close those gaps. At the end of the day, however, you must have a product that services the vast majority of feature/function requirements as defined by your market.

I recently saw this announcement from one of our competitors:

http://blog.zuora.com/zblog/2010/06/zuoras-june-10-release-major-new-functionality-allows-zcustomers-to-accurately-track-payment-operati.html

I’m not sure how the services team at Zuora has been working around this for so long.  Refunds are a basic part of being able to accept credit card payments.  But I have to congratulate them on working around such a gap.

It does beg the question: what else are they working around?

Doug SmithTags: , ,
Posted by Doug Smith in Client Services | No Comments »