How to Find Lost Money

Hi everyone, welcome to this episode of Catch up with ChiroTouch. Thank you for tuning in. I'm your host today, Anna Pacota from the sales team here at ChiroTouch.

And today we'll be exploring lost money and how to find it. Let me set the stage for you. Offices want to make it as easy as possible for their patients to pay, right?

In theory, by making the payment process pleasant or even so nondescript, we can help patients forget that payments are even involved. Therefore, patients are more inclined to come back, which of course means more money for your practice. This is where saved cards on file and reoccurring payments can be so beautiful to make this happen.

It also saves your clinic and staff time. It's convenient for patients and many are more inclined to pay via a virtual method rather than cold hard cash or pulling out their credit card every time they come in. But there is one big but here.

So what happens when that virtual payment gets declined? This beautiful payment process now gets derailed, right? And you or your staff have to work hard to not only track down that payment note, but also get updated payment information so we can have the right stuff on file.

That's a big ugly problem. This is where our guest today, Crystal Sarto of Global Payments comes in. She's going to explain this concept called declined minimization which helps to avoid this problem and help you find this money before it even gets lost.

Hi, Crystal. Welcome and thanks for being here today.

Hi, Anna. Thank you for having me.

Yeah, absolutely. We're exploring this cool topic and I know you have lots to share with our listeners. But before we jump in, can you tell me a little bit about your background with payments?

Sure. My role here at Global Payments Integrated is dedicated to managing the partnership with CT Payments. I have personally been in the industry for over 15 years, including roles at Mercury Payments, First Data, and over five years here at Open Edge now known as Global Payments Integrated.

I also have some experience running businesses on the entrepreneurial side as well as selling software solutions.

Awesome. Today we're talking about lost money. To start from the beginning, how does money even get lost, Crystal?

What are we talking about here?

Today the focus is largely on replaced credit cards. Think lost, stolen, expired, name change, etc. When a customer has a card on file, these cards are run upon due payment.

But in some cases, as you just described, they decline because they've just been replaced with a new card.

Yeah, absolutely. That makes total sense. When my card got stolen, I called in, I'm waiting for a replacement, they give me a new one, and now I have a new number, and so that completely makes sense to me.

Okay, so let's talk in terms of dollars. So what's the scope of lost money? What are we talking about?

Are we trying to quantify that?

So as an example, let's say a practice submits over 100 recurring payments a month, and that average ticket, let's say is about $123. In that instance, the average value of delayed and lost payments is $8,069 a month.

Whoa, that's a big chunk of change, right? So that represents a big amount of that money that we're trying to collect. So how much of that would you say is typically recovered by contacting the patient to update their payment on file?

Not much at all. According to our studies, 93% reported card declines being delayed by a day or more. 25% by more than a week.

And over 75% of businesses see at least some declines never collected at all.

Goodness. Yeah, that's some interesting stats. So what are these businesses doing?

So how are they even trying to recover this money?

So common approaches that we've found with our studies are approximately 90% spend time calling the customer, 42% send sale mail, 50% send an email, and 22% wait until the next customer's visit.

So you would kind of think of all these as old school methods, right? With the new technology that Global Payments is offering about decline minimization. So talk to me about this concept of decline minimization.

How does that work? And if you want to tell a little bit to our listeners about what you guys do and how that would help with this problem, how does decline minimization work?

So the great part is with CT Payments, Cardon File and Decline Minimizer are already integrated together and ready to go for those who sign up. The way that it works is when the customer's card is enrolled, it's stored in our secure token vault, which is updated nightly. We process the transactions with the new data and the software in CT Payments is updated as well.

As a result, our customers have reported a 49 percent reduction in credit card fees, 43 percent improved staff productivity, 52 percent better customer relations, and over 63 percent saw an increase in cash flow.

That's amazing. That's really, really great. Let's say, because I talked to customers that might have a different integration with another company or maybe with their bank or what have you.

Is this something that is unique to Global Payments and our integration with you guys?

It is. So you'll find that other banks or processors may have their own version of a similar service. But here's a few key differences.

First of all, it's free.

Nice.

There's no additional cost. It's already built into the software. Other services oftentimes can charge either an enrollment fee and or a monthly service fee.

A big second difference is that Decline Minimizer is proactive. Many other services are commonly reactive. So we update that data nightly in order to prevent declines, whereas many other services begin that process after the card declines.

A third difference is that it's also automated behind the scenes using our secure in-house token vault. Many other solutions on the market oftentimes require a manual process. In many cases, that also entails using a third party.

So this is just happening for our clinics. They might not even realize that this card has been updated because it's just happening for them. It's just automatic.

That's right.

That's so awesome. For our listeners, this is something that is available to you. If you're a ChiroTouch customer, this is available through our CT payments.

If you are not a customer yet, or if you want more information about CT payments, this is something that we could definitely help with. There's some great advantages of having this integration with global payments, like stored card on file, these reoccurring payments and the decline minimization, and being able to pay from a link directly from a statement. So there's some really good features.

So to our listeners, if you want more information about this product, we would love to give you more information on that. Crystal, any final thoughts, anything else that you would like to share with us today?

Yeah. So first of all, thank you, Anna, for having me. It's been a pleasure and a special thank you to all of the CT Payments customers out there.

If someone is on CT Payments and is not sure if they have this feature or has not activated it, we're happy to turn it on for you. And to those of you out there not using CT Payments yet, hopefully we can have further conversations around these features for you.

wonderful. Thank you again, Crystal, for sharing your knowledge with us on this topic. It's been awesome to have you here.

So thank you as well. And thank you to our listeners for tuning in to Catch Up with ChiroTouch. Find more episodes of Catch Up with ChiroTouch on Spotify, iTunes and chirotouch.com/podcast.

Again, I'm your host, Anna Picotta, and I wish everyone listening a well adjusted day.