Creating an Improved SaaS Customer Experience by Becoming A PF: Insights from WorkWave’s Journey
Serving as a software partner to its field service customers, payment facilitator WorkWave has found that payments are an integral part of the services it provides. The company has built a positive payment experience for its customers while investing payments revenue back into its software to build a better product.
It hasn’t always been that way.
WorkWave provides software to companies including pest control, lawn care, cleaning, HVAC, plumbing and electrical, and last-mile delivery services. The company offers cloud-based solutions to support its customers’ needs across their entire business lifecycle, including marketing and selling to new and existing customers, servicing those customers, managing satisfaction, online reputation, and their digital presence. Becoming a payment facilitator has enabled the company to help their customers manage the movement of money through their organizations as well.
Before it became a PF, WorkWave outsourced the payments process to another provider. At that time, it would often hear from unhappy customers who were looking for help with problematic payment transactions – and weren’t always getting it. The lack of customer support from the payment processor was impacting WorkWave’s reputation and their customers’ overall experience.
At the same time, WorkWave’s customers were asking for advanced payment-related functionality, such as ACH, check scanning and secondary forms of payments, like Google and Apple Pay. But with the payment processing outsourced, they could not provide this additional functionality to customers.
Ultimately, WorkWave found that they could best resolve both issues by bringing payments in-house — by becoming a payment facilitator. Doing so has allowed WorkWave to craft a customer experience, both within Customer Service and within their software, that reflects the superior experience they want their customers to have.
“WorkWave customers live on our software. It literally runs nearly every aspect of their business. In addition to a great product and a great experience when working with us, they want a partner that can meet all of their needs whenever possible — someone who knows, cares about, and understands their business,” said David Giannetto, CEO of WorkWave.
Operating as a PF has enabled WorkWave to do this by giving their customers greater control over their cash flow and the ability, in turn, to offer their own customers the variety of new payment methods they are looking for.
And while WorkWave knew that it could expect additional revenue from processing payments, it has found that the revenue has been substantial enough to allow it to reinvest in its customers. The company estimates that they have helped over 90% of their customers save money on payment’s processing.
“By being a payment facilitator, WorkWave has been able to unify the buying power of its customer base in a way that they would not be able to do on their own. The result is that they can all jointly benefit from this in the form of lower rates,” Giannetto said.
“When we decided to become a payfac it was to improve the customer experience and to maintain our position as the leading software in our industries. We didn’t expect to be able to save our customers money as well, but as their partner we’ve been very happy to pass this savings on to them. And we expect to be able to do truly transformative things for our customers’ industries that would not be possible otherwise.”
Becoming a PF has brought some significant benefits to WorkWave. But how did it get there?
Over the next two weeks PaymentFacilitator will go in depth with WorkWave to learn more about the factors that ultimately drove the company to choose the PF model. We’ll also talk about the issues and challenges the team faced along the way and how they overcame them, how the process changed the way they operate, and how their customers have reacted.
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