“…With INETCO Insight, we were able to see immediate improvements in our billing accuracy, with the number of ‘unidentified’ transactions decreasing by over 90%. In terms of spending money on capital projects, these billing improvements resulted in INETCO Insight being my best payback project for 2010.” – Brian Shackleton, SLM Rural & Transactions, ICT Services – Gen-i (Telecom New Zealand)
I love sharing this type of success story, especially when it involves one of the fastest-growing and most innovative information and communications technology (ICT) service providers in Australasia…not to mention New Zealand’s two largest processors of electronic funds transfer point-of-sale (EFTPOS) transactions: Paymark (which operates New Zealand’s largest electronic transaction system, the Paymark EFTPOS network, for its owner banks’ ASB Bank, Bank of New Zealand, the National Bank and Westpac), and EFTPOS New Zealand (which is owned by New Zealand’s largest bank, the ANZ National Bank)…OK. So who wouldn’t, really?!
The Telecom New Zealand case study is a testament that mirrors many of the similar transaction monitoring challenges and merchant customer service demands encountered by large banks, ATM deployers, EFT networks and payment processors responsible for processing thousands of point-of-sale (POS), debit, loyalty, mobile, and other web-based transactions each day.
It seems the general rule is that the greater number of customers and service offerings you have, the more granular the transaction intelligence required to deliver a top-notch end customer experience and meet growing service level expectations. But who has the time and resources to capture, assemble and sort through all this data in an efficient, cost effective manner?
The sheer volume, not to mention the growing complexity, of transactional data has driven the need for more robust alerting, data mining and trend analysis capabilities than ever before.
One of the most efficient, cost effective ways to tap into and exploit transaction intelligence is by deploying a business transaction management (BTM) solution. Used as a precursor to deep dive application performance management tools, BTM solutions provide a way to automate the process of collecting and correlating the granular transaction data needed to manage multiple applications and services within complex payments environments. BTM solutions also provide the tools needed so that this data can be “sliced and diced” to improve customer service and optimize business performance. Consider some things you can do with BTM:
Improve the end customer experience by:
– Capturing and correlating the data needed to produce value added services such as transaction audit trails, billing reports and regulatory compliance reports
– Providing accurate breakdowns of transaction types and volumes by merchant customer to verify customer billing accuracy
– Setting up real-time alerting to detect changes in transaction performance that can help mitigate risk throughout service upgrades and legacy migration exercises before customers call in reporting issues.
Optimize business performance by:
– Setting up transaction profiles and continuously monitor the changes, data exchanges and response times of your transaction environment
– Breaking down transaction volumes and revenue generation for each service platform
– Analyzing the breakdown of transactions by switch, point-of-payment applications, transaction types, and card types
– Moving from reactive troubleshooting to proactive problem isolation by quickly identifying performance issues such as network latency, authorization denials, incorrectly programmed POS terminals, and other issues that may be causing declines or slowdowns in transaction completion times.