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Education

StreetSmarts SM

Lessons learned from a decade of change

By Dee and Emily Karawadra targeting: hospitality, retail, petroleum, POS VARs,
Impact PaySystem ecommerce and restaurants. This enabled us to grow
our niche markets with a solid program and resources to
hile embarking on a new year and new support our merchants. Investing in the technology that
decade, we've been reflecting on what has helps run our office is also a place where we stepped it
really made a difference in our business. up in the last decade. Customer relationship management
W The past decade was full of exciting times (CRM) software was not often heard of prior to 2000;
in our industry. As ISOs and merchant level salespeople today the marketplace is swimming in office management
(MLSs), we have all weathered a lot as merchant service systems trying to streamline all aspects of business.
providers in the ten years.
We took on the project of creating a proprietary CRM to
When the decade began, we were just placing mobile aid in managing our merchants and sales partners. We
terminals, and cell phone technology was hit or miss. have found the money and time invested was well worth
Now this sphere has exploded, giving us easier ways it. The ability to have all information on all processors
to bring payments to non-brick-and-mortar businesses. accessible via one platform was huge for our support
Technology has expanded businesses into the mobile staff, as well as for the MLSs needing to communicate
market, making payment acceptance fast and easy. We with merchants and have a back-office in their own home.
also saw the implementation of EMV technology and Use new strategies
chip card issuance. And we saw that checks did not go out
of use as predicted, but rather ACH became a common Sales in our industry is not what it used to be. The days
transaction mode for many businesses. of telemarketing and sending out mailers are gone. In the
past decade, people in all walks of life emerged from My
What did we learn from this decade of change? Here are a Space and embraced Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, Snap
few initiatives that helped us weather the storm of change Chat, LinkedIn and many more social media apps. This
in our industry. has influenced every facet of contemporary life. We now
Invest in technology hunt for jobs on social media, buy and sell items through
social media-powered marketplaces, and make friends
Technology is ever-changing, and it continually brings and connections via our phones. It only makes sense
new challenges and opportunities. The payments that those of us in the payments business have to market
technology of five years ago is now considered old and differently to obtain new customers and sales agents.
outdated. There is no doubt an essential way to stay on
the competitive edge and keep acquiring new merchant We, at Impact PaySystem, were late to the social media and
accounts is to offer the latest and greatest technology. digital marketing game. We spent time deliberating, not
knowing what the attrition rates would be for obtaining
We did this in our business by strategically partnering new merchants via digital marketing. We have now come
with processors that had the best technology we could to embrace networking via social media and all it has to
find in the industry. As we grew, so did our partnerships. offer. We found that word of mouth is now a referral on a
We sought out the key players in the verticals we were social media site or being tagged on a local business. We
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