[VoiceOps] OT: Payment bureau

[Carlos Alvarez]

On 11/19/09 7:37 AM, David Hiers wrote:
> What are the barriers to using the existing credit agencies?  I've
> never personally looked into what it takes to report a customer's
> performance to an agency, but  I'm sure someone in my company has got
> it figured out.

Interesting topic.  We've been fortunate to be hit by only three losses, 
two of which were mortgage companies that were boarded up the minute the 
big failure hit.  No way to prevent that one I suppose.  The third was a 
company that purposely took us for $3200.  After we sent him to 
collection we learned that he'd done that repeatedly over the previous 
couple of years to many other VoIP companies.  It was just part of his 
business model.

As to the question above, I've never decided to do it because we're a 
small company and usually get to know our customers.  We're still not 
hooked into any company like that because even after that one large 
loss, our overall loss rate isn't high enough to justify it.  There is a 
monthly subscription, a minimum usage, and a cost per lookup.  The 
minimum usage is much higher than our new-subscriber rate, and if I look 
at the cost of the service over the years, it would have been more than 
our losses.  In addition, the collection agency in the case I posted 
above found that their credit wasn't bad, they were just committing this 
fraud against VoIP companies only.

So I think it's a great idea to have something we as small companies 
could work with.  Unfortunately I don't have any ideas on how to 
implement this and make it pay for itself.  I do believe there is a need 
for it.

-- 
Carlos Alvarez
TelEvolve
602-889-3003

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