Punchey Launches Punchey E-Invoicing As A Major New Product Enhancement

 New product development gives small businesses greater control and choice over how they accept payment from their customers.

Boston MA, 6 March 2013 – Punchey Inc., the revolutionary online marketing and payments platform company that helps small businesses grow, today announced a major enhancement to its PuncheyPayment and PuncheyLive products: e-invoicing. 

Now, not only can Punchey’s customers accept credit cards from anywhere and at any time, but they can also invoice their consumers via email giving greater flexibility and choice about how and when to take payment.  This powerful enhancement matches the simplicity of using any of Punchey’s online products.  A customer simply chooses which consumer to invoice, enters a few relevant details about their service and then PuncheyPayment performs the calculations and emails the invoice directly to the consumer.  The accompanying easy-to-understand analytics in PuncheyLive ensures that customers can easily track who has paid, the revenues generated, and which invoices remain outstanding.

“The ability for small businesses to accept credit card payments at the point-of-sale in the field using PuncheyPayment has transformed the way that our customers interact with their consumers” said Chief Executive Officer Nathaniel Stevens.  “Not only is this a safer and more reliable way for consumers to pay, but the history of all transactions is captured in our marketing platform – PuncheyLive – which gives Punchey’s customers the ability to produce targeted campaigns to generate new business in the future” Stevens continued.

“But not all consumers can, or want, to pay immediately therefore our new electronic invoicing solution means that they can pay at a later date while this is all comprehensively managed with invoicing and analytics so no payment is missed.”

Stevens concludes, “At Punchey we recognize that mobile credit card processing is important and an enabler in making small businesses more competitive, but competitiveness doesn’t stop there.  By using our electronic invoicing solution, small businesses are taking the next step in becoming a major provider of goods and services with real, flexible, payment options.”

This enhancement is immediately available to existing customers.  To find out more about Punchey and their products, visit www.punchey.com or email sales@punchey.com.

About Punchey

Punchey is a revolutionary marketing and payments platform company that help small business grow.  Success-oriented small business owners select Punchey for its turnkey ability to attract and retain customers while maximizing their lifetime value.  The company provides an end-to-end payment processing and marketing solution for small and medium-sized businesses, enabling them to get paid wherever, whenever, while giving customers a reason to come back again and again.

Punchey was founded by the noted serial entrepreneur and investor Nathaniel Stevens. Stevens previously founded Yodle.com, an Inc. 500 company that provides local online advertising and lead generation services. He also runs Stevens Ventures, a technology and media investment fund.

To start transacting more with Punchey or learn more, visit www.punchey.com or call

1-855-PUNCHEY.

Media Contact

Chris Lee

857-263-7595

Paperless Receipts: A Silver Bullet?

As a consumer, I hate paper receipts.  I never know what to do with them.  Yet I feel compelled to keep them – at least until they show up on my credit card statement – especially because I have been to more than one local place that takes my card into a back room to process it and that scares me. 

So I always get excited when a business asks me if I would like them to email me a receipt as an alternative to a paper receipt.  An emailed receipt doesn’t require any physical storage and it can be accessed for as long as I want.  It is easily printed – if needed – but otherwise it stays in the cloud, documented, and not attributing to excess wallet bulk.  There are many benefits to getting rid of paper receipts.  Here are three reasons why offering digital receipts will benefit your business and is arguably a silver bullet that simply – but effectively – solves several business challenges.

Environmentally-Friendly and Reduces Costs

Eliminate paper costs – and help save a tree or two – by offering paperless receipts.  With all the hype around global warming, environmental consciousness is affecting consumer behavior:  Many consumers are actively seeking businesses that offer environmentally-friendly goods and services. Taking advantage of this trend can be a great marketing tactic for small businesses.  By offering a digital alternative to paper receipts your business contributes to saving the environment in several ways: eliminating paper waste, reducing deforestation, and not endorsing the manufacture of rolls of wasteful paper receipts. 

Additionally, the average roll accommodates about 275 receipts, with a case of 50 rolls typically costing anywhere from $50-$90.  With digital receipts, you eliminate all of these unnecessary costs: your silver bullet hits its first target. 

Easier Bookkeeping

Most businesses that still use paper receipts tend to retain them until handing them over to their bookkeeper at the end of each month, but some proprietors prepare their accounts themselves instead and spend hours poring over their receipts.  With this approach, not only do you have to worry about keeping track of each receipt, but you must also safely store your stacks of receipts until they can be cross-referenced with your accounts.  Whether you manage your own accounts or you hire a professional bookkeeper, digital receipts allow you to access any receipt from an organized, sortable, and electronic database at any time or place.  Your receipts are all together and readily available to view.  If there was ever a simple way to ease the production of your accounts to fulfill your bookkeeping obligations then paperless receipts is just that: your silver bullet strikes again.

Customer Friendly

From a customer service perspective, not only do paperless receipts offer an air of professionalism and style but they also help you build a customer database which you can then target with future marketing campaigns.  And achieving this is simple but subtle: to email the customer their receipt, you need their email address!  Suddenly, your customer database – that records their transactions and therefore their interests – is rapidly growing.  You are building a profile of your customers that was previously unachievable!

By capturing email addresses or mobile phone numbers, you now have the ability to offer your customers loyalty programs and can stay in touch to offer promotions and more.  And while the customer is impressed with your use of technology and they can retain their digital receipt indefinitely, your silver bullet is solving a third business challenge: attracting repeat business from your customers and retaining your brand in their minds.

If this sounds attractive to you then take a moment to consider PuncheyPayments and PuncheyLive.  With PuncheyPayments using a modern mobile device, you can accept credit card payments on-the-fly from any of your customers.  Enter their email address and, whoosh, their receipt flies through the internet and lands in their inbox.  Impressive huh?  Then sign in to PuncheyLive and see details of every transaction and receipt – dates, times, who, what – it’s all there.  With the simple swipe of a credit card and whoosh of an email, you are building your success for the future.

Contact us to find out more.

Image Credit: www.planetreceipt.com

Image Credit: www.mirano.ca 

Communication: The Key to Customer Retention

Running a business and delivering great customer service used to be a lot simpler.  Your customers would hear about your business from word of mouth, and would come back over-and-over because you sold quality products or provided quality services and your staff was friendly and polite.  It’s not so easy in 2013.  In today’s digital world, consumers are more demanding than ever, and the instant gratification they receive from being “plugged in” to an infinite marketplace online, through social media, and on their smart devices, doesn’t help matters.  Well, that is, unless you take advantage of it.  The best small businesses have adopted new technologies and mindsets when approaching customer communication; improving customer retention and giving themselves a competitive edge.   

Keeping in constant communication with your customer – from the time they find your business to after you have made the sale – not only demonstrates your commitment to each customer but it also prevents customers from having a wandering eye (and going to a competitor because they felt their needs haven’t been met). 

This infographic explains what customers are looking for from businesses these days.   We are going to tackle three of the ways that you can communicate with your customer in order to provide them with an immediate service, and ensure they keep coming back (see arrows on infographic above).

Social Media:  Social media isn’t just a great brand awareness tool.  For small businesses, it is a great way to target customers based on demographics, interests, and other criteria.  It is also a great listening and engagement tool.  By following keywords on Twitter and Facebook and generating a customer community where you give information, advice, run promotions, and respond to questions and concerns, you can create relationships with your customers, stay relevant, and learn their wants and needs. 

Live Chat on Your Website:  What better way is there to provide a direct connection to your business from your online presence?  Offering an online chat feature on your website allows your customers to easily contact you without ever having to pick up the phone.  It gives the impression that your business is “always there for the customer” and readily available to address complaints or answer questions.  Punchey can install an online chat feature on your website that ties directly to a marketing platform that records customer information for future use.

Information Retention from Visits: You may see many faces on a daily basis, but each customer expects a certain level of individualized attention, particularly repeat customers.  It is important to have an informative database of customer information so that you can serve your customers better, remembering their preferences, their buying pattern, and contact and billing information.  But there are only so many hours in the day: how could you possibly achieve this?  Punchey has developed a marketing platform that intelligently collects customer data including name, purchase type, email and more with every transaction.  Then, you not only get to track your sales on a daily basis, but you also have your customer information for future reference and communication. 

One of the best ways to think about how you should treat your customers is to treat them like an old friend.  Good friends don’t hesitate to send an email or text to say “what’s up,” they touch base to see where you are in your life, and they KNOW you and what you are looking for.  The best small businesses treat their customers the same way.  They follow their patterns and interests not only when they shop but also in the community (using social media).  They send email campaigns to keep customers up-to date-on the on-goings of their business and to give them the chance to be the first to know about promotions and other specials the business is offering.  And lastly, they make it easy to talk to them, whether it is through their website, social media, or chat.  It is 5 times more expensive to acquire a new customer than it is to keep one and a 2% increase in customer retention has the same effect as decreasing costs by 10%.  So watch your business grow by improving your communication with customers.

Let Punchey make it easier for you to communicate with your customers in many ways.  Schedule a demo by emailing info@punchey.com today or chat with us on our website at http://www.punchey.com. 

Image Credit: www.yoursalesleads.com

Image Credit: www.clicksoftware.com

Image Credit: www.garywhitehill.com

Why Every Home Service Business Should Accept Credit Cards

Any service that requires you to visit a person’s home is going to be intimate.  Customers therefore have to display a large level of trust when inviting a stranger into their home.  Their buying experience becomes just that: an experience – one that is unrivaled by picking up a product in a retail shop because this experience physically and emotionally involves the customer.   While there are many things home service businesses should be doing to enhance their business and grow their customer base, probably the two most important things are to build customer trust and focus on customer retention. 

Here’s an example:  Laura, a Boston resident, has a broken dishwasher and she needs a same day service to fix it because she is hosting a party that night.  She goes to Google and types “same day appliance repair Boston.”  If you’ve done everything right from a marketing perspective, your business pops up.  Your visually pleasing, easy-to-navigate website tells Laura that NOT only do you provide same day services, but you also accept credit cards AFTER you have fixed her appliance (otherwise it is free).  Laura is overjoyed to know she can pay using her card while you are present, now she doesn’t have to go out and get cash just to accommodate you, and she knows she will be getting what she paid for at the same time.  You show up on time and fix Laura’s dishwasher, much to her relief.  You tell her the cost and swipe her Visa right in front of her, on your iPhone.  She knows your business is legitimate and doesn’t have to worry about fraud, and you have payment right away.  She signs for the dishwasher repair with her finger – also on your iPhone – and you email her a receipt and head on your way.  You have two benefits: a happy customer and an easy sale. 

Whether you are a massage therapist that makes home visits, a handyman, landscaper, electrician, plumber, cleaning company, or any other home service provider, the services you provide are just as much about the experience the customer receives as they are about the actual service itself.  Accepting credit cards as a payment option not only gives your clients flexibility but it also shortens your payment cycle.  You no longer have to mail invoices or wait for payment, which helps with your cashflow. From the customer’s perspective it makes you appear professional and in tune with your business, all while giving them transparency. 

According to Lee Resource Inc., it costs 5 times more to acquire a new customer than it does to keep a current one.  This is where Punchey can help home service businesses.  Using a revolutionary new marketing platform, Punchey gives you the ability to not only accept credit cards anywhere and at anytime, but then uses the data that you collect from those transactions to build an in-depth customer database that allows you to stay connected to those customers through email campaigns, review collections, and more. 

Give your business a TransactionBoost and differentiating factor by accepting credit cards and getting the most out of your customer data.  Contact Punchey today at 855-PUNCHEY or info@punchey.com.

Image Credit: www.pr-homeservice.com