Understanding your end consumer and their customer journey is critical to elevating the customer experience while maximizing your transaction volume. Spreedly's robust reporting allows you to analyze your customers payments to fine-tune your payments strategy. Watch the most recent Payments Dialog episode with Rich Ruddie from Repcheck/Bizcheck to learn how to use customer insights to re-engage and re-capture customers, developing lifetime value and maximizing overall revenue.

Want to learn more about how Spreedly can help your organization adapt and grow your payments? Reach out to us here.

Payments Dialog Full Transcript:

Peter Mollins: Hi, everybody. This is Peter Mollins, with Spreedly. Very excited to have you here for another Payments Dialog. Today, I'm joined by Rich Ruddie, who's with Rep Check and Biz Check, among a number of different ventures. Really excited to have you here, Rich.

Rich Ruddie: Hey, thank you for having me today.

Peter Mollins: Absolutely. So, I'd love to hear a little bit about your story. So maybe would you mind introducing yourself and giving some background on Rep Check and Biz Check, if that's okay?

Rich Ruddie: Yeah, absolutely. So I've been in the reputation management and monitoring space for the last 11 and a half years. And a few years ago we found a need that clients really wanted to do more review monitoring for what is being said about them online, what mentions are going on, what the internet is saying about them, and to give kind of a cloud score on what things look like. So we were looking for both. Once we built the product, we said, "Okay, now we have a great product. Now we have to figure out the best way to manage all the clients." And speaking around with a few other internet and digital marketers, one said, "I have a really secret weapon and it's my secret sauce. I don't like to share it because it's so good, but it's called Spreedly."

And that's how I got introduced to Spreedly and our programmers have just absolutely fell in love with the ease of being able to organize a lot of our data. It really is an amazing CRM where we can track all of our customers. Everybody's in there. If anybody wants to check on a customer, we can do that right from the dashboard. And then we've been really amazed with the ease to monitor how many current customers we have, what our churn rate is. And if we ever lose subscribers and we want to cancel, or we need to charge them, it can all be done very easily through Spreedly. And we use Stripe for most of our payment processing. And everything's been really seamless.

Peter Mollins: That's great. Now, you'd mentioned the importance of monitoring the customer that are connected to you. So how do you monitor the success of payments across these many businesses that you have?

Rich Ruddie: Yeah. So it is kind of a hassle if you were doing it by hand or you were doing by spreadsheets to monitor that. So we've actually built a dashboard through Spreedly and what it is is it has everything from subscriber counts, order counts. We even put in something, if we had physical payments like e-commerce platforms, it'd be great for that as well. We have the dashboard showing if there were any failed payments. That's a really big thing to keep track of.

So as we have clients that are signing up for the service, we automate the majority of what we do. So they have a portal they can log in, they can see all of their alerts and updates. And then what happens is sometimes clients are very happy with the service and they're on for years. Sometimes they use the service for a couple months and then we see that they're not logging in, they're not using the service. So we're able to go in and say, "What can we do to make our service better? How can we help you?" Or if a client's card is canceled or is coming back declined, we're also able to use Spreedly to both update accounts and to help those clients make sure that they can be onboarded and retrieve the service and alerts as they need.

Peter Mollins: That's great. Now, it sounds like there's a number of different key performance indicators, or KPIs, that you're using to monitor the success. It sounds like authorization waits is one. Are there other KPIs that you're using to monitor the health of the payments world for your customers?

Rich Ruddie: Yeah. Spreedly has a function that we use and that shows us how many cards are coming back declined, how many cards are no longer valid, how many cards need to be updated, and how many cards are just no longer good or just didn't have funds or were not able to be charged that month. So those are really great KPIs that we look at every month. And we try to figure out is it based on our price point, is it based on the time of the month that the client has signed up and that's when their bill date is. So that's something that we've been able to look at. And that's really because of the offerings and software from Spreedly.

Peter Mollins: That's great. Now you've mentioned a couple of the businesses that you've started. As a serial entrepreneur, I imagine you're starting up many of these businesses and you probably see recurring patterns of challenges in regards to payments as you're rolling out new companies. What were some things during the development and launch of Rep Check or Biz Check that you saw that you've learned for future launches?

Rich Ruddie: Well, yeah, organization is key, especially as we've built more software companies and we've tied those in with Spreedly. So in the past, what we were doing, each individual website would have its own individual Spreedly kind of CRM back end that we would build. Now, we're seeing that sometimes we can tie in. So, for example, we have a gaming client, think of Netflix for gaming, and there's multiple video game sites. So instead of each one having its own Spreedly dashboard, we've tied all those in together so we can have a more central place to look at all the numbers and finances and everything. And just being more organized with the data is incredibly helpful. So that would be my advice for anybody starting out. The first go around's going to be a little more difficult and you'll find ways to get more organized and with using the proper software is the best way to organize for future ventures.

Peter Mollins: That's great. It's great advice. Thank you. So Spreedly is in the payment orchestration space and the idea of orchestrating multiple payment services to help support a payment strategy. How do you think that payment orchestration helps you and your teams to deliver a great payments experience?

Rich Ruddie: Yeah. So one thing we found when we've signed up with some of these other merchant processing companies is they have what's called a cap or a limit on it. So it's been really great having the ability to see, okay, we are going to hit a cap. So maybe for the first 12 days of the month, we're going to use XYZ merchant. And then we can also shift other payment processing to the other merchant for the other 18 days of the month and things like that. Orchestrating and figuring out the best way to organize customers' payments and also making sure that we're in the guidelines and following with the caps or other placements from the merchant processors.

Peter Mollins: That's great because you're not only increasing your short-term revenue but giving a great experience to your customers as well. So then they're more likely to stick with you in the long run when they have a great payments experience as well.

Rich Ruddie: Yeah. It would be really frustrating if every time their re-bill cycle was up there was a problem on our end and they were getting declined and then the system or software was automatically canceling them out. That certainly wouldn't benefit them and it would be a problem that was ours internally that we'd have to fix. So yeah the orchestration's definitely a very important component of what we do kind of in the back end in the software space.

Peter Mollins: That's great. Well, Rich, it's been great to talk to you, but I'd love to hear maybe just one last parting question, would be what do you see in the future? What's coming on that horizon for you and your teams?

Rich Ruddie: Just continuing to grow, that's always important, but also organization, as I talk to a lot of business owners and individuals recently. So everything from the crypto market collapsing to the stock market collapsing, everybody's just kind of bracing to see what the short-term future holds. So we're just trying to make things as lean and seamless as possible. And that's one of the reasons that we really like Spreedly. So I think as people can find better seamless products to streamline processes, that's really going to be the biggest thing for the next couple of years, especially as the potential for needing cost savings comes in.

Peter Mollins: Okay. Terrific. Well, that's great advice. Well, Rich, again, very, very good to chat with you and really enjoyed the chance to hear more about your businesses and how you're using payment orchestration to deliver a great customer experience.

Rich Ruddie: Yeah. Thank you again. I'm all in on Spreedly and thank you for having me. And it was a pleasure when I got to come to the office in Durham and see the place in person.

Peter Mollins: That's great. Thank you.

Rich Ruddie: Thank you. Have a great day.

Peter Mollins: You too.

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Download the Payments Orchestration eBook Below