Making big data work for small merchants

Womply powers a unique platform, Insights, designed to help merchant-focused companies and ISOs acquire, retain and monetize merchants better. Insights makes big data work for small businesses so they can use technology and data to their advantage to grow and protect their businesses while simplifying the amount of time running their businesses requires, the company noted.

"In most cases, business owners today don't have access to all of the information they need to run their businesses," Cory Capoccia, President of Womply, said. "They have a difficult time answering questions like: What do I do when someone posts a review about my business online? or How do I stay informed of changes my competitors are making to win customers away from me? or Am I spending my advertising budget effectively to attract more new versus repeat customers into my business?"

Capoccia added that Insights provides merchants answers to these questions and more, and gives the referring ISO credit for delivering the value. "This helps increase merchant loyalty in ISO portfolios, which otherwise would experience very high attrition rates," he said.

Customer retention weapon

Today, ISOs are under attack by tech companies like Square Inc., and others, looking to use value-added services to grab market share. To help ISOs retain merchant customers, Womply equips them with the solutions that small and midsize merchant businesses require to thrive, but were previously available only to companies with multimillion-dollar IT budgets. Womply noted that its products are priced affordably, enabling ISOs to offer merchants a leg up over their competitors and the ability to grow revenue.

The Insights solution pushes data to merchants, informing them how their businesses are performing over time and relative to their competition, who their best customers are, and what their customers are saying about them on various online review sites like Yelp, Facebook, Google and more.

Womply pointed out that it also helps merchants prevent and manage negative online reviews, identify their best customers, and advertise to acquire new customers.

"Because of the value merchants receive, ISOs who offer Womply's products to their portfolio have seen a 17 percent average reduction in attrition rates," Capoccia said. "We're very proud to play a part in helping to keep our partners' merchant churn lower than what they would have experienced otherwise. We also enable our ISO partners to change the type of discussion they typically have with merchants, from a cost-based conversation of, How can I save you money on your processing? to a value-based conversation of, How can I help you run your business better, make more money, retain the customers you've got, and save time?"

Win-win-win

Today's busy merchants often don't have enough time to get everything done. Womply stated that Insights helps merchants connect with their customers and conduct highly effective marketing campaigns without hassle.

"Our mission is enablement and simplicity: How do we connect merchants directly with their customers and give them access to the set of marketing skills and resources that they don't have in house?" Capoccia said. "How do we make it easy for them to make decisions around customer acquisition so they don't have to figure it out on their own?" That means providing merchants the maximum advantage so they can use their hard-earned funds as efficiently as possible, especially when they are operating on extremely tight budgets, he added.

Womply emphasized it will continue to focus on saving time for small business owners in the areas that might have caused merchants headaches historically. "Importantly, we want to make sure that our ISO partners are getting credit, because when merchants receive that value, they become even more loyal to the ISOs we are working with," Capoccia said. "When we help our ISO partners sell, retain, and monetize merchants better, and merchants run their businesses better, it is a win-win-win for all three parties involved."

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