If you don’t already know it, the credit card processing industry is extremely competitive. It’s hard to win customers and easy to lose them. Customers will leave you for a couple of bucks or one bad transaction. Reviewers and competitors will call your company a scam and warn others to stay away.

It’s also challenging to recruit, train and maintain a great team. It’s not an easy job—it’s mostly sales and customer service. When you hear from a customer it’s probably because they have a problem. Rarely will a customer call you up out of the blue to tell you what a great service you provide, even when you do. All this comes with the territory.

Yes, sometimes we are quite passionate when trying to sell our services. We do it because we know we can save them money or provide better service, or both. When a bank is gouging a retail customer because they don’t know any better, what should we do? Do nothing, or try to educate them as to how AppStar can help them keep more of their hard-earned money? When viewed this way, we’re less of a sales organization and more of an education company. We’re in the business of educating small businesses how they can do better for themselves.

Credit card processing is also a complicated business. Small business owners rarely understand all that goes into taking care of their money and getting them paid on time. But that’s okay. That’s what we’re here for.

How we survive with our customers

We’ve been around for 17 years so we must be doing something right. We start by offering the lowest rates while providing excellent customer service. But that’s only the beginning.

We’ve survived by having integrity, fixing problems when they occur and not constantly raising rates with no notice. We’ve survived by offering a friendly voice on the phone rather than placing customers on hold. We’ve survived by being honest, which includes admitting to a potential customer when we can’t help them.

We’re proud of our customer service. We’re friendly and patient with our customers. And we try to do right by them as evidenced by a Yelp reviewer who said we’ve, “gone above and beyond in helping us in the matter of taking care of a large transaction and making sure the funds are being sent to us…”

Above all else, we always act in our customers’ best interest. We resolve technical issues quickly. We’ve even been known to unwind an order if there’s even a question that the error is ours. It’s why our customers tend to stay.

How we survive with our team

Just as we have very low attrition with our customers, most of our team has been around long enough to develop ongoing relationships with our customers. Over half have been with us a decade or longer. That says a lot.

We’ve survived by paying our team members well. We’ve survived by working with our new recruits until they get up to speed and don’t let go until they succeed. We’ve survived by providing excellent training.

Our partners are just as crucial to our survival as our team. That’s why we offer our outside sales consultants one of the best commission structures in the industry. It’s also why we help them develop new skills like consultative selling, lead generation, networking and account management. We want our outside sales consultants to hone these skills even if they don’t represent us forever.

We understand that AppStar can only go as far as the team will take us. That’s why we invest so much in them. It’s one of the keys to our survival.

We’re not perfect

Few business are. But we care about our customers, about our team and work hard to rectify any issues that we can. And that has allowed us to not only survive, but thrive in an ultra-competitive industry. Lasting almost two decades, we must be doing something right.

If you think you might like to take advantage of our services or join our team, let us hear from you.