Voice of the Customer

TMCnet - The World's Largest Communications and Technology Community
New Coverage :  Asterisk  |  Call Center Outsourcing  |  Call Recording  |  SIP Trunking  |  Hosted Exchange  |  PBX
Webinars
Channels by Topic
Share
 
| More
RSS-XML alerts
Print this page
E-mail this page to a friend
Voice of the Customer Featured Article Archive

TMCNet: Woodland Park bank offers new way to pay merchants through cell phones

[November 06, 2009]

Woodland Park bank offers new way to pay merchants through cell phones

Nov 06, 2009 (The Gazette - McClatchy-Tribune Information Services via COMTEX) -- "Cash, credit card or cell phone?" That's what nearly three dozen merchants in Woodland Park are asking their customers as part of a trailblazing 3-week-old program designed to reward residents of the Teller County city who shop with local retailers.

Park State Bank is one of a handful of financial institutions nationwide that have issued postage-stamp-sized stickers to account holders to attach to their cell phones. The stamps are used like debit cards.

About 100 of Park State's 6,500 customers have activated the stickers, which can be used at 34 Woodland Park merchants to buy meals, merchandise or services, said Tony Perry, bank president.

"Our goal is not to leverage this into an income source -- we're just hoping to break even -- but to instead get people to shop locally and keep our tax base in Teller County," Perry said. "We didn't want exclusivity on this program; we want every financial institution here to participate. We still have a lot of merchants to talk to, but once we get more merchants on board, consumers will follow." Information on the sticker contains the customer's bank account information and a radio-frequency-identification chip that is scanned by a wireless reader at the merchant. The chip sends the information over an encrypted cell phone network to the bank to get the transaction approved. Once the transaction is approved, the system sends a text message to the customer's cell phone with the merchant's name, amount of purchase, account balance and rewards earned.

The program, offered through Palo Alto, Calif.-based Bling Nation Ltd., is attractive to consumers because the bank is giving a 3-percent reward on every purchase until at least mid-April that can be redeemed at the same merchants. Park State and Woodland Park merchants like the program because the fees they pay on each transaction are about half of what they pay on debit and card transactions, said Rod Stambaugh, Bling Nation's regional president in Broomfield.

Tracie Bennitt, a customer at Joanie's Bakery and Delicatessen in Woodland Park, said she uses the Bling system because it is "convenient, easy to use and the bank pays me to use it -- that is the best part. I also am a big advocate of getting people to shop local." Joel Vasek, co-owner of Joanie's, said one or two customers a day are now using the Bling system, but he expects that to increase as more customers learn about it. He agreed to use the system because it was easy to set up and required no upfront cost.

Stambaugh estimates about one-third of Woodland Park's 110 merchants are participating in the program, including Quizno's, Papa John's, Big O Tire, Seven Arrows Gallery, Charitable Treasures, the UPS Store and Studio West.

Bling Nation began offering the program in La Junta in June and now has 75 percent of the Arkansas Valley city's merchants participating and nearly two-thirds of the customers at State Bank, which also operates a branch in Falcon but hasn't decided whether to offer the program there.

To see more of The Gazette, or to subscribe to the newspaper, go to http://www.gazette.com. Copyright (c) 2009, The Gazette, Colorado Springs, Colo.

Distributed by McClatchy-Tribune Information Services. For reprints, email tmsreprints@permissionsgroup.com, call 800-374-7985 or 847-635-6550, send a fax to 847-635-6968, or write to The Permissions Group Inc., 1247 Milwaukee Ave., Suite 303, Glenview, IL 60025, USA.

[ Back To Voice of the Customer Community's Homepage ]
› Return to Voice of the Customer Home

FOLLOW US

FREE Voice of the Customer eNewsletter

Subscribe Now

Featured White Papers

  • Seven Best Practices for Speech Analytics: Speech analytics is valuable for identifying issues in the contact center. However, limiting its use to the contact center only considers a portion of all customer interactions and subsequently only reveals a small part of the voice of the customer. This paper discusses how organizations can optimize their Speech Analytics implementation strategy to realize the promise of this exciting technology.
  • Understanding the Voice of the Customer: Today's contact centers involve a sea of information that must be captured, processed, and distributed on a daily basis. Effective use of this information enables companies to remain competitive in an increasingly aggressive and customer centric marketplace. An overwhelming percentage of the information that circulates in a contact center's audio recordings, documents, web pages, and emails is unstructured in that it resides outside of a normal structured database and cannot be managed efficiently. These unstructured items contain valuable information, yet this information historically has been difficult to organize, categorize, and access.
View All ›

Case Studies

  • Aflac: Aflac, the leading provider of guaranteed-renewable insurance turned to Autonomy to help them automate the process of monitoring their contact center agent for quality and compliance. The company now has a system that can offer continued improvement in agent quality and productivity while enhancing the customer experience. ...
  • Avaya: Avaya, a global leader in business communications, inherited 880 websites as well as numerous intranets and extranets when it was spun off from Lucent Technologies. The sheer volume and diversity of the sites and the over 500 content creators resulted in inefficient content distribution rife with divergent branding, messaging, and product information. ...
View All ›

Video Showcase

    Interview with Autonomy: Rich Tehrani interviews Simon Hayhurst, SVP of Autonomy

Featured Events

  • Multichannel Analytics with Autonomy Explore: In today's world of constant connectivity there are a variety of direct and indirect channels of communication between an enterprise (or a brand) and its customers. 80% of these valuable interactions are generated in a human-friendly, unstructured format across multiple touchpoints and channels. With this ever growing mountain of information how do you extract the emerging trends and topics of interest to the enterprise? ...
  • SES Chicago 2011: Marketers and SEO professionals attend SES Chicago each year to network and learn about topics such as PPC management, keyword research, SEO, social media, local, mobile, link building, duplicate content, multiple site issues, video optimization, site optimization, usability and more. The conference offers 70+ sessions, intensive training workshops, and an expo floor packed with companies that can help you grow your business. While you're at it, network with peers and leading industry vendors. Programmed by the SES advisory board, you can be assured - SES content really is king! ...
View All ›
 
Share
 
| More
RSS-XML alerts
Print this page
E-mail this page to a friend