Top 7 Customer Support Best Practices for Payment Providers

1) Empower Your Merchants To Help Themselves

“Most people would prefer to solve their own problem than to go through support, so it’s essential to empower merchants to help themselves. A great way to do that is by walking your merchant through everything at the beginning of your relationship. 

“If you’re providing them with a gateway, take them through the back end. If you’re providing them with hardware, walk them through troubleshooting. Make sure they know where to access documentation. Things like that. Taking a little extra time at the start to make your merchants feel comfortable with their services and technology can save you an enormous amount of time and support resources down the line.”

• Cristi VanNest, NMI Support Manager

2) Measure the Success of Your Service Carefully

“Great customer support can be hard to measure at times, but the more you can define success, the better your results will be. I recommend using scorecards to make quantifying certain support goals easy and consistent. Things like agent availability, percentage of calls taken and percentage of tickets closed are all easy to quantify, and a scorecard keeps everything in order. 

“But the quality of communication and support is really what matters most. Will the resolution to this issue prevent another ticket from being opened down the line? That’s harder to measure, but it’s worth including and spending time to analyze. Then, with scorecards and a consistent evaluation strategy in place, it becomes easy to identify weaknesses and turn them into strengths.”

• Grant Garris, NMI Director of Global Support

3) Refine Your Triaging Strategies

“Triaging support issues is crucial to ensuring problems are solved successfully and in the correct order. And that’s a huge part of creating a great customer experience. You need to identify not just what a problem is and who the ticket needs to be sent to but also who it impacts and how immediate it is. 

“For instance, a problem affecting multiple accounts should almost always be prioritized ahead of an equally serious problem impacting just one. However, a very serious problem for one customer could warrant immediate attention over a wider but more minor issue. 

“Making these choices on the fly is a recipe for disaster. At NMI, we have specialists who analyze tickets, triage them and move them to the right departments. For smaller businesses that can’t do that, having your triaging strategies well defined and written down so your agents understand them and quickly reference policies and assign priorities is key.”

• Mariasol Rodriguez, NMI Senior Support Manager

4) Invest in Your Support Team, No Matter How Small

“It can’t really be emphasized how important it is to invest in the training and tools your support staff needs to succeed. One support agent trained well has a more significant impact than five agents trained poorly. That means even the smallest payment providers and SaaS platforms can outcompete bigger competitors on support if they lean hard into training. 

“Front-end support can be easy to overlook on the operational priority list. But that makes it a huge opportunity because there’s a good chance your competitors have overlooked it. Invest in your support team and the returns in time saved and quality of customer experience will be shocking.”

• Michael Sacco, NMI Support Manager

5) Start Codifying Knowledge Immediately

“One of the biggest mistakes companies with small support teams make is letting lessons from successful resolutions go uncaptured. Every time a new problem is solved, or a lesson is learned from an interaction with a customer, it should be immediately codified in a knowledge base or training materials. 

“Capturing lessons and procedures effectively ensures future support agents don’t have to figure things out all over again when the same problems inevitably pop back up. That greatly improves speed-to-resolution and the quality of the customer’s experience. It also makes training faster, easier and cheaper. Payments companies, especially small ones with tight budgets, should start making this kind of codification a standard operating procedure from day one.”

• Jack Booth, Customer Support Manager 

6) Study Resolutions to Issues You Have To Escalate Out

“There will inevitably be times when your support team can’t handle an issue due to its complexity, and you’ll need to pass it along to your payments partner for resolution. That’s a normal part of selling a complex product. But, far too often, ISOs and ISVs hand the issue off, get the solution back, and then move on. That’s a huge missed opportunity to learn and grow. 

“You should always pay special attention to any issue you have to escalate beyond your own support team. First and foremost, if you can replicate the solution, then you can solve the same problem internally in the future, speeding things up for the merchant. It’s also like free training that your organization can absorb to enhance your own support capabilities across the board. That’s a valuable opportunity that shouldn’t be passed on.”

• Grant Garris, NMI Director of Global Support  

7) Know Your Payments Partner’s Offerings Inside and Out

To add one final piece of advice, learn your payment partner’s offerings inside out — both on the product and support sides. It can be hard to develop a deep knowledge of all the products you sell, especially if you’re an ISO working with multiple processors. But, the more product knowledge you can develop in your team, the faster you’ll be able to answer merchants’ questions and fix their issues. And in payments, speed matters.

When the time comes for you to turn to your processing partner for assistance, the more you know about what kinds of support they offer and how to engage with it, the smoother the process will be.

How does their ticketing system work? How do their support tiers work? Is there a way to get an issue to the right person faster so the merchant doesn’t get juggled? Do they offer an AI self-serve tool that can get you an answer right away, like NMI’s new chatbot Penny?

Ultimately, the more deeply familiar you are with your payments partner, their offerings and their support systems, the better you’ll be able to serve your merchants.

If you’d like to know more about how NMI’s industry-best support team can help you elevate the merchant experience and maximize customer loyalty, we’d love to hear from you. Feel free to reach out to a member of our team any time.