Customer relationship management (CRM) systems built for the payments industry are transforming how payment professionals like independent sales organizations (ISOs) manage and grow their merchant portfolios.
The payments industry is complex, and without the right tools, it can also be extremely opaque. Unlike generic CRMs that require expensive customizations or integrations to support core payment functions, purpose-built CRMs are built specifically to address the daily tasks and challenges payments companies handle. The right solution will be fine-tuned to handle residuals, onboarding, portfolio management, merchant recruiting, and more.
In particular, payments reporting tools are designed to cut through the fog, shining a light on your data and putting elevated analytics and business intelligence just a few clicks away. The result is a deeper understanding of your operations, your merchants and your residuals and, in turn, better decision-making and a stronger road map for growth.
In this article, we’ll look at the key areas of your payments business a payment CRM like NMI Merchant Central can improve, including:
- Residuals
- Agent transparency
- Merchant onboarding
- Portfolio analytics
- Merchant performance
- Sales and agent performance
- Disputes and retrievals
- Merchant support
Built-in Reporting Power
Reporting should be one of your payment CRM’s greatest strengths. The right solution will provide a variety of customizable reporting dashboards designed to provide deeper, clearer and more accurate insights into all aspects of your payments business.
NMI Merchant Central offers better data organization, easier-to-understand presentation and complete flexibility over what data you see and what periods it covers. And, because no report is ever more than a few clicks away, it’s a reporting system your team will actually want to use.
Automatic, Unified Residuals Reporting
One of Merchant Central’s most powerful features is its unified residuals reporting. Just load the monthly residuals reports from each of your processing partners into the system, and it will:
- Automatically pull the relevant data from each distinct report and combine it into a single, unified source of information
- Apply all splits, instantly calculating your monthly residuals and the payouts due to each agent or sub-ISO down to the penny
- Allow you to view residuals information at the portfolio, processor, merchant or agent level
You can easily upload old reports going back as far as you’d like. Merchant Central makes it fast and easy to go back and view accurate residuals data and agent payouts from any period with the same level of clarity and control.
Industry-Best Agent Transparency
Merchant Central enables you to give permission-based access to your agents, so they can log into the browser-based or mobile versions to track their own residuals whenever they want.
Merchant Central is invaluable to your agents because it lets them see deal statuses, merchant performances, and complete current and historical residuals. These tools also make Merchant Central a powerful tool for establishing strong, long-term relationships with your top performers, built on a foundation of transparency and trust.
Merchant Onboarding Reporting
Merchant Central offers automated onboarding through TurboApp — a proprietary tool that makes it possible to onboard merchants to top processors in as little as five minutes, with no time-consuming and error-prone manual data entry required.
TurboApp offers extensive reporting, including complete details on all ongoing and historical merchant applications that have been sent through the system. An important part of minimizing time-to-processing and onboarding friction is providing quick access to onboarding status reports. Whether an application is approved, denied or sent back for additional information, TurboApp updates the status automatically and the CRM notifies all relevant users.
In-depth status reporting and automatic updates allow agents and onboarding teams to stay on top of the process and get merchants approved and processing as quickly as possible.
Portfolio Analytics Reporting
Merchant Central makes it easy to keep track of your portfolio’s health. In just a few clicks, you can get access to in-depth data including:
- A visual dashboard of portfolio performance
- Monthly volume growth in dollars and as a percentage
- Monthly revenue growth in dollars and as a percentage
- Average profit per merchant in dollars, BPS and as a percentage
- Monthly BPS margin growth as a percentage
- YTD profit in dollars and BPS
- Lifetime profit in dollars and BPS
- Top performing merchants
- Merchants that have stopped processing
Instant access to concise portfolio data makes it easier to maintain a clear view of your payments business. That ensures you’re always on the right overall track and can react quickly and decisively if you start to drift off your goals.
Complete Merchant Reporting
With CRM at its core, Merchant Central is a powerful customer data tool. It makes it easier to capture, manage and access more data on merchants — both signed and potential partners still in the lead pipeline. In each merchant’s account, you can quickly access all saved documents, a complete history of interactions and user notes, current processing or lead status and more.
You can also monitor each individual merchant’s ongoing and historical processing and access key merchant-level data including:
- Year-to-date merchant profit in dollars and BPS
- Lifetime merchant profit in dollars and BPS
- Each merchant’s last 12 months at a glance
- Monthly statements
Keeping a closer eye on your merchants helps you track top and bottom performers, identify opportunities for upsells or cross-sales on additional merchant services, minimize merchant attrition and more.
In-Depth Sales Metrics
Merchant Central provides in-depth analytics on your team’s sales activities. As long as your agents are using the system, you can track everything — the number of touches with prospects, emails sent to call times, the number of account notes agents create and beyond. You can also easily see the number of accounts an agent has signed in any given period and what their overall contribution to your portfolio is.
Better sales data enables you to identify performance trends, agent strengths and weaknesses and opportunities for additional training. As a whole, it helps you develop and retain a stronger team and maximize close rates.
Real-Time Dispute Reporting
Merchant Central includes powerful dispute reporting tools that help your team and your merchants stay on top of dispute and retrieval rates, respond to illegitimate charge-backs faster and win more cases. Dispute reporting features include:
- Automatic day-zero notifications that ensure agents and other stakeholders know about new disputes right away
- Automatic day-one and day-three follow-ups on disputes that haven’t been addressed
- Complete reporting on all open, decided and expired disputes
- Better visibility into dispute totals — critical data in the wake of new programs like Visa VAMP
Merchant Support Reporting
Merchant Central includes a help desk with a full reporting dashboard that enables your support staff to resolve issues faster. Staff can quickly run reports on all their new, pending and closed tickets, review past solutions and communications, and more. When new tickets come in or an existing ticket’s status is updated, the system automatically pings any stakeholders to ensure everyone is on the same page.
Better support reporting creates a more efficient environment where solutions are reached faster and with better outcomes. Most importantly, better reporting ensures no tickets slip through the cracks or get left in limbo for days or weeks at a time.
Clearer Payments Reporting, Better Decision Making
Merchant Central is a payments CRM that automates and streamlines your company’s most critical reporting. It eliminates the time and friction involved with manually generating reports, and it gives you clearer, more valuable insights that result in more impactful decisions.
If you’re ready to find out more about how Merchant Central can take your reporting to the next level, reach out to a member of our team today.