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Education

and everything you can do or offer to
It is no surprise that the small to midsize make the merchant happy that he or
merchants we all started out chasing, and that she chose you.
some of us continue to chase, are Too often we put merchants on auto-
pilot, and when they leave, we usu-
being acquired by the Squares and PayPals ally assume the reason is that they
of the world. We have lost that channel market. wanted to save money. However,
many times it has to do with technol-
As much as this stinks, they may have ogy or customer service or just plain

done us a favor. hands-on support. I have to admit
that I am somewhat guilty of this,
and some of it is due to the fact that
So everything came out great for us and not so great for the other guy, which I have been doing this for a very long
got me to thinking. When was the last time any of us offered to go beyond the time, and maybe I'm just a bit jaded.
call of duty to make sure that a merchant was accommodated?
Maybe the solution to this problem is
Strategizing for the future that I, as well as others, should stop
wasting our time on any merchant
First of all, I realize that a merchant doing only $10,000 to $20,000 a month does that cannot do a minimum of $1 mil-
not really warrant spending a great deal of money just to make sure that the lion a year in credit cards. These larg-
merchant's experience is all warm and fuzzy. However, this was a multimillion- er merchants are the ones that don't
dollar merchant. When you get to that level, you had better think of anything just need hands on support; they
demand it. It is no surprise that the
small to midsize merchants we all
started out chasing, and that some
of us continue to chase, are being ac-
quired by the Squares and PayPals of
the world. We have lost that channel
market. As much as this stinks, they
may have done us a favor.

So from now on, what I plan to do
is make absolutely sure that we not
just pay monthly visits to all of our
merchants that do more than $1 mil-
lion a year; we will also offer a better
hands-on customer support experi-
ence – and thus never end up saying
to a merchant who leaves our compa-
ny, "Why didn't you ask me?"

Steve Norell is director of sales at US Merchant
Services Inc. Based in Port St. Lucie, Fla., he
oversees the USMS sales force and main-
tains the company's bank and processor
relationships. You can reach him by email at
steven@usmsllc.com or by phone at 772-220-
7515.

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