How GutterMaid automated phone payments

Automating phone payments

We believe that it is important to support small business by giving them access to the same high-quality tools that are available to large enterprises but on a budget that small businesses can easily afford. With this in mind, Datatel and Authorize.net teamed up to level the playing field by offering small business owners a high-quality IVR Payment solution to automate their acceptance of payments over the phone.

CryptoIVRTM LITE IVR Payments with Authorize.net changed the way that GutterMaid collects payments by phone and leveled the playing field with an enterprise quality phone payment tool on a budget that every small business can afford. With Datatel’s CryptoIVRTM, GutterMaid can now securely accept their customer’s confidential payment information by telephone with no need for them to ever handle any credit card information.

Making it easier for customers to pay

Datatel’s CryptoIVRTM Interactive Voice Response (IVR) technology makes it easy for customers to pay 24/7/365 by following a series of automated voice prompts that guide them through entering their credit card information on their phone keypad. The CryptoIVRTM application then securely transmits their credit card information directly to Authorize.net for secure and PCI-compliant payment processing with real-time settlement in the merchant’s connected account.

As a small business owner, the ability to collect what is owed to you is critical. You just can’t afford to carry a large book of uncollected receivables. At the same time, you have to wear many hats, managing everything from sales and marketing to operations and collections. The chore of spending hours on the phone to collect payments is something you can do without.

The Guttermaid story

The story of Jesse Whitehurst, owner of GutterMaid, gutter cleaning service in Maryland and Northern Virginia, is one that Datatel has heard many times over the past year from small business owners. As a small business providing home-owner maintenance services, Jesse is constantly working to drive new business, manage his service crews and collect from customers.

“It’s my responsibility to ensure the company runs smoothly at all times, both when we are slow, and when we are extremely busy. I try to stay ahead of things by being prepared for the worst.”

With the daily need to process all payments, as well as other important tasks, there are just times when Jesse and his team have to work late, and even weekends. GutterMaid has always tried to make it as easy as possible for their clients to pay and some customers will always prefer to pay by phone.

“Although we have always accepted phone payments, we used to process them with a live representative. Having a high-volume-based business, this took a lot of valuable time from our administrative resources.”

Jesse prefers to invest his team’s time into aspects of the company that provide the most value. In person phone payments were time-consuming and he wanted to automate accepting phone payments to eliminate the need for his staff to take down customers' credit card information.

Obviously, larger businesses can easily justify the cost of an IVR payment system. But this is also true for small businesses where time is both tight and a business owner’s most valued asset. The more they can automate their processes, the more they can focus their efforts on building the business and driving a better experience for their customers.

Jesse tells us that “with the IVR Payment system in place, we have been able to eliminate payments via our administrative staff, while still providing our customers with a phone payment option that is available 24/7. The IVR Payment system has been a very valuable asset to our company, as it frees up our administrative staff to assist our customers in other ways.”

How the IVR Payment system saves time

“The IVR Payment system," explains Jesse, “saved us a lot of phone time, and I can confidently say that it has allowed for more family time for my staff. We still deal with collections, but this has enabled us to completely remove ourselves from the process of taking payments”.

Jesse was also really pleased with how little time and effort it took to get this all set up: “The process was relatively painless and easy. Datatel was very responsive during the set-up process, as well as with continued support”. Jesse adds, “Authorize.net has been very easy to use, and has an easy to use, intuitive portal interface”.

With Datatel’s CryptoIVRTM LITE and Authorize.net, GutterMaid was able to easily deploy secure and PCI-compliant automated IVR Payments to replace their old process of staff accepting their customers' credit card info. In Jesse’s judgment, small businesses “absolutely can’t afford not to do it!”