AT&T Corp. is offering merchants with high credit card transaction volumes a toll-free telephone service that streamlines the labor-intensive authorization process.
The service, 800 Transaction Advantage, uses interactive voice-response technology to speed the collection and processing of order and billing information from customers who call in.
AT&T said the service is ideal for catalog sales and equally suited for renewing subscriptions, paying association dues, confirming reservations, or collecting donation pledges by telephone.
"Now merchandisers can speed transactions for repeat buyers and target their products to impulse buyers - those consumers who see what they want and want it as soon as possible," said Kathy Marsico, AT&T's national product manager for 800 business applications in Basking Ridge, N.J.
"Organizations involved in fund-raising also will find 800 Transaction Advantage a convenient way for donors to make contributions and an effective tool to increase pledge fulfillment."
How It Works
Callers to the system hear an automated voice menu that guides them through a transaction. They use touch-tone keys to enter such data as a personal identification number, merchandise selection code, dollar amount, and card number.
Callers with rotary-dial phones can provide information verbally, which is processed by AT&T's 800 Speech Recognition capability.
Once the information is entered, the system works like a credit card clearing house, validating the purchase and putting the transaction into the interbank clearing system.
AT&T offers an option that enables a business to verify shipping addresses by matching the caller's phone number with various data bases.
800 Transaction Advantage customers pay a per-call charge ranging from 14 to 48 cents, plus a usage fee of 5 to 11 cents per minute for each call, depending on their calling volumes.
Verifone Inc. has introduced ProfitNow, a full-service leasing program designed to make the vendor's equipment and support services attractive to smaller merchants that are still processing paper credit card drafts.
For as little as $8.29 a month, merchant acquirers of credit card transactions can lease the recently announced Verifone Tranz 460 and Omni 460 systems, which integrate a receipt printer with the point of sale payment terminal.
Verifone said it has shipped more than 100,000 such integrated terminal-printers since 1990, and they have been installed in over 25 countries.
A standard product warranty is included in the lease price. For what it calls nominal fees, Verilone will add a variety of support services including deployment, user training, help-desk assistance, and expedited repair and replacement.
The Redwood City, Calif.-based leader in compact payment terminals said ProfitNow gives banks and other processors an incentive to convert retailers from paper-based to electronic authorization, draft capture, and settlement, without major up-front investments, staffing, and facilities costs. The merchant processors could then expect additional fee income that would typically more than offset the leasing fee, making ProfitNow a self-funding proposition.
Verifone said its recent acquisition of the portion of Verifone Finance that it didn't own gave it the flexibility to develop a creative financing plan for the low end of the merchant market.
"Like our highly successful Electronic Merchant Program, ProfitNow is designed to enable our U.S. resellers to pursue the hundreds of thousands of merchants still using paper to process credit card transactions," said Roger B. Bertman, vice president and general manager of marketing network systems. "This not only gives our customers a competitive edge, but also drives industry growth."
