It seems whenever we have written about PMT, it is in conjunction with a merger, some other company joining the PMT family, or more recently, the acquisition of PMT by NOVA Corporation. Well, now we have a new twist -this story is about two recent PMT graduates who have set out on their own to make their mark on our thriving industry.
Vaden Landers and Jason Burgess, both former members of the PMT management team, left earlier this year to form Bancard Consulting Group, Inc. (BCG). While at PMT, the duo held responsibilities ranging from those associated with Merchant Services to managing Acquisition & Conversion related activity. This meant they had daily contact with ISO players throughout the industry and were forced to identify and address day-to-day business challenges of the same.
One of the constants found during the duo's travels was that in many cases customer support was being outsourced by ISOs, due to the fact that it was less expensive than developing a system of their own. Landers and Burgess have partnered with other industry professionals to develop, and market for sale, BEACON (tm), a software product that unites merchant related information by way of a single database.
BEACON
BEACON(tm) Call Center Management System is a comprehensive, module-based software package designed for use in credit card processing customer support environments.
As many Green Sheet readers know, merchant acquirers have two choices when it comes to merchant support: they can either run their own call center or outsource it to a third party service provider, such as an authorization and capture network (e.g. VisaNet/Global Payment Systems/Paymentech, etc.) or a processor (Vital, First Data Corporation, etc.).
Again, as many Green Sheet readers are aware, the catch-22 of outsourcing is that while you lose the headache of directly managing the call help desk, you relinquish control over the level of service your customers will receive. And, it can be very cost prohibitive. But, those who decide to maintain the immediate control are still faced with other dilemmas, such as:
Errors created as a result of duplication of data entry efforts
Increased time and expense associated with training of employees
Increased expenses as required to hire programmers and developers
BEACON works to solve these problems by allowing the company to maintain the control and have an organized, cost-effective way to access data. BEACON offers add-on modules which give ISOs an opportunity to build a customer support system that meets their specific needs. Some of the modules include:
Warehousing of all merchant related pricing and processing fees
Automated feeds of data to and from external sources for updating and file build capabilities
Tracking & reporting of every merchant contact
Warehousing of all merchant demographic and bank related information
Application tracking systems
