By Ken Musante
Napa Payments and Consulting
I don't fill out customer surveys. Ever. Just because I shopped at your store does not mean I want to spend another two minutes so I can provide you feedback. You rang up my items proficiently and pleasantly. The hotel was clean. The flight was on-time. You answered all my questions accurately. That's the service I am paying for. I am frustrated when issues arise. I am irritated because I must spend time correcting them. I'm not filling in an online survey. And I always press "1" when asked if I will provide a response to a brief survey at the conclusion of a call—but only out of fear that my experience will be inferior if I do not. Of course I never complete the survey.
Any survey done is inaccurate. It excludes curmudgeons like myself. Respondents are tainted by the pleadings of service personnel who beg for replies because it will increase their pay or is a part of their performance review.Hotel staff leave notes with QR codes linking to online surveys, and upon checking out, guests get three to five requests to fill out surveys. Some will include free points or an entry into a contest. If you are relying on prompted surveys, you are already lost. Data is gold. Look at your data and you will know your trends and service.
I understand that social media is important, and online reviews are one way a merchant may garner new clients which, at times, necessitates online reviews. Data, however, is unvarnished and unsympathetic. It is not swayed by a flowery note or heartfelt request. Companies like Shopify, Clover and Square recognize this. They all have modules to allow business owners to leverage their own data. Stripe's dashboard is included with the product and allows merchants to remotely manage payments from the Stripe App. The dashboard is basic, but it allows merchants to track payments and earnings and compare them to historical data.
Clover, Toast and Square have similar dashboards, and while these dashboards are not the same as direct client feedback, they allow merchants to understand details and behaviors about their clients. Repeat clients and ticket sizes can be parsed and compared to historical data. Sales by time of day, server, margin or menu items can be compared.
This is powerful. Sales professionals should explain how using this data can propel profitability. Further, data can help businesses understand when they need to staff up or when they need to cut back on employees to more efficiently manage their staffing costs.Also, although providing more value and greater data driven decisions is key, the vastness of the data has value for predictive modeling and determining future trends at a much more granular level.
I purposely used the Stripe example, as although its dashboard is rudimentary, Stripe provides this to all of its clients. Most legacy processors make specific data available in accordance with a merchant's POS. And, in this context, unless it's a proprietary POS, the processor is blind to the details. Think of a merchant, utilizing a mega-processor with an agnostic POS. The transactional level data is not shared with the processor. The processor may not know key client data such as tips or SKUs.
While processors will know repeat customers and time of transactions, they won't have other key metrics such as cart abandonment and tax amount. Further, processors need a dashboard to provide this data back to the merchant, and because the data available is inconsistent, many merchants do not have dashboards as a part of their merchant services.
This is an enormous gap in traditional offerings that is being exploited by new fintechs and payfacs providing complete end-to-end solutions. These newer offerings have far more details and provide that information back in a consistent format—typically both in mobile and desktop format.
Processors should appreciate this gap and solve for it. Until this gap is solved, Square and Stripe will continue to steal volume. Clover can and should be used as an alternative, but if legacy processors wish to remain relevant, they will need a data set that is consistent and available to all of their merchants. 
As founder of Humboldt Merchant Services, co-founder of Eureka Payments, and a former executive for such payments innovators as WePay, a division of JPMorgan Chase, Ken Musante has experience in all aspects of successful ISO building. He currently provides consulting services and expert witness testimony as founder of Napa Payments and Consulting, www.napapaymentsandconsulting.com. Contact him at kenm@napapaymentsandconsulting.com707-601-7656 or www.linkedin.com/in/ken-musante-us.
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