Reinventing Partnerships; The Merchant Warehouse Partner Program
By Bob Cellucci, Vice President of Sales: Partner Channel, Merchant Warehouse
“Merchant Warehouse is more than just a payment processing company. We are a trusted business partner that provides a flexible business model that adapts to our partners’ needs.”
What has been the primary focus of your partner program?
The best Partner Programs span far beyond training, incentives, sales tools, event support, and meet-or-beat guarantees.
Our Partners expect great service and support and differentiated products. At Merchant Warehouse, we understand that it’s up to us to support our partners’ businesses. In 2011, we refocused our efforts around a simple objective: Provide the best value and the best experience for our partners and merchants. To facilitate this, we needed to make some changes.
Building on Merchant Warehouse’s years of success, we made major additions to our management team bringing an extensive depth of knowledge, insight, experience, and leadership to each part of the organization.
We implemented a litany of changes to deliver operational efficiency and quality improvement. As in any successful organization, we recognize that our people are our best asset and represent a significant value to our partners and merchants. To invest in their success, ability, and development, we implemented a comprehensive in-house training process for everyone in the company. We’ve even enhanced our hiring process to assure the best possible candidates make the team.
What are the core drivers of your partner program?
The Alliance Team has grown 3-fold. Each Alliance Manager has years of business and partnership development experience. They work closely with our partners on strategy and the development of action plans designed to maximize mutual business potential. Relationship Managers assure that dayto- day partnership needs are met and that the action items necessary to achieve our partner’s business objectives are executed. Finally, VAR Alliance Managers work directly with our VAR Partners to assure that they have the tools, training, support, and incentives to be successful.
Merchant Care is critical and our partners expect VIP treatment for their merchants. Over the past several months, we’ve rolled out: a formal Call Quality Assurance program, Customer Retention Group, Customer Satisfaction surveys and scoring, and Agent scorecards. We’ve also focused on service line responsiveness. Our average speed-of-answer is thirteen seconds. 84% of our calls are answered in less than thirty seconds and our abandonment rate is under 2%.
In December, we re-launched our Partner Program and deployed an all new Partner Portal. The program is interactive and designed to deliver the appropriate amount of tiered support based on our partner’s business objectives. Elements of the program include:
- Dedicated 1-on-1 Integration Support
- Sponsorship support for Events and Tradeshow
- Collaboration on co-branded marketing and advertising
- Lead Pass — for top tier partners
- Product Licensing
- Billing services for SaaS/Haas
- Partner Portal Access to Reporting, Training, and Marketing tools
What does this all mean for your partners and the value they receive?
Merchant Warehouse continues to be a leader in the payments business with the most honest, transparent and aggressive residual program in the industry. All fees are clearly disclosed with no surprises and we back that up with easy-to-read and easy-to-access transparent residual reporting.
Merchant Warehouse is more than just a payment processing company. We are a trusted business partner that provides a flexible business model that adapts to our partners’ needs and to the needs of their merchants.
Contact Information
Merchant Warehouse
1 Federal Street, 2nd Floor
Boston, MA, 02110
PH: (800) 498-0823
partners@merchantwaresolutions.com
Twitter: @Bcellucci
www.merchantwarehouse.com
www.merchantwaresolutions.com