Hi,

We are looking for a payment gateway that also handles customer service and sales in their call center. Any ideas?

Thanks

What kind of services/goods do you sell?

Do you mean handles customer service and sales call center for YOUR members?

example: If you are a hosting company and want your payment gateway to take incoming cs calls from the clients you have hosted with you (if its this .. I'm sorry, I know of none)

OR do you mean a gateway that handles cs and sales TO the hosting company and other vendors using their gateway? (if its this ... yes, by all means)

Netbilling has a call center for this purpose, but do you really want to outsource your sales & customer service to a company whose primary business model is an electronic payment gateway?

Originally posted by coreybryant
Netbilling has a call center for this purpose, but do you really want to outsource your sales & customer service to a company whose primary business model is an electronic payment gateway?

Hi,

I am looking for a call center to handle all incoming calls for products sold (our photo equipment) abd our membrship sites. I will check into Netbilling tomorrow. I actually think that having a company that handles our transactions also handle the customer serrvice too if they do it well because their best interest is to have us do more transactions through upells and customer retention, right?

Thanks

Personally, I would say no. I have no faith in call centers. I managed one for five years - answered for over 1,000 phsycians. You know - if you work at a fast food joint & you know what goes on behind the scenes - you can never eat there again? Same with me. I would never use a call center. You are asking a business - whose primary business model is an electroni gateway to answer your phone & tell your customer everything they want to know about photo equipment.

The call center reps are only as good as the information you provide them & you can never provide them with enough information.

Originally posted by coreybryant
Personally, I would say no. I have no faith in call centers. I managed one for five years - answered for over 1,000 phsycians. You know - if you work at a fast food joint & you know what goes on behind the scenes - you can never eat there again? Same with me. I would never use a call center. You are asking a business - whose primary business model is an electroni gateway to answer your phone & tell your customer everything they want to know about photo equipment.

The call center reps are only as good as the information you provide them & you can never provide them with enough information.

We actually visited Netbilling's and Tele-direct call center today and had a short meeting with both of them. We were not happy with the pricing or attitude of Tele-direct execs at all.
However, with Netbilling, we were quite impressed. They have about 60 reps and a bunch of supervisors. I must say that I do not see their gateway processing as their primary focus. The call center and processing seem to compliment each other nicely and they give their reps commission incentives for sales/upsells/ cross-sells etc... We are going to give them a try for both and I will surely post how it works out after a few weeks. We should be up and running with them by this Monday.

Thanks for the input

Anytime. Glad that I could help with it. The interesting thing you said - a bunch of supervisors - why? Are there that many problems they need them?

I've seen call centers used very adequately when the goal is just basic "order taking" calls... like those $19.95 products sold on infomercials and so forth. Or calls for refunds/returns processing.

But I'd agree with Corey that it is a non-trivial proposition whenever you try to have a call center handling anything beyond the most basic request.

Running a call center can be a tough business - some companies have a lot of job turnover and then have to constantly train & re-train employees. I saw this first hand at a call center that I worked with for about a year.

However, there are always those exceptions of every rule and maybe NetBilling is one of them. Definitely let us all know how it turns out and best of luck with it!

webhoster2004

If anyone can get it done well (and I agree with Corey that nobody at a call center knows your products as well as you do) it would be netbilling.
I have to admit they are a very professional group, I've had the pleasure of meeting a couple of their key managers over the years and have always been nicely impressed.

Good luck and once again, let us know how it goes!

Originally posted by coreybryant
Anytime. Glad that I could help with it. The interesting thing you said - a bunch of supervisors - why? Are there that many problems they need them?

Hi,

Actually they had one supervisor as a team mnember for about every 6 or 8 employees to maintain quality control. We are going live Monday so I will keep you nposted on everything.

Thanks

ok - As promised, here is our results after a few weeks live with Netbilling...

We are very, very happy. They are not only handling all of our fraud scrubbing and processing but are taking all of our phone orders fomr our media ads. We have not had one issue and have tested the call center hold times, and the abilities of the telemarketers thoroughly with random calls. Oour buy rate is well over 60% compared to calls coming in and that is exceptional in my opinion. We will be launching additonal campaigns soon and will surely use them again.

As far as their payment gateway, we have not had any downtime or connectivity issues and their reporting and support is the best we have ever seen. I love the way you we can control all of the fraud scrubbing tools.

10 thumbs up so far for Netbilling!

Glad you are happy. My only complaint with them - is the way they advertise the prices on their site. For a lot of people reviewing - they think they can get an internet merchant account for 1.5%. Other than that - they seem to be a stable operation.