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Data-driven support

gocardless.com

67 pointstimrogers14 comments

Have you considered providing this data to merchants? For example, it would be great to know if you do get any calls for customers (or my prospective customers) and to see roughly what they're asking.

That way the merchants can act on the data too (and hopefully reduce the number of customer calls).

Tim from GoCardless here - that's a really cool idea.

We'll look into it for sure, and we'd definitely consider down the line releasing more general data about what our merchants' customers call us about. We think it's really important to help those using us to optimise their integrations.

Nice post.

Tangentially, am I the only one who feels the card is a brilliant, simple, secure UX, and that I don't really see the draw of the cardless approach? (I guess I see the draw of weakening monopoly players like visa/mastercard but the selling point for the individual seems so weak.)

Founder of GoCardless here.

GoCardless makes it really simple to set up Direct Debits (ACH in the US). Direct Debit is a really cheap & simple way of accepting recurring payments - for stuff like subscriptions & regular invoices.

For example, something like 75% of the UK pay their gas, phone & electricity bills by Direct Debit. GoCardless is making that infrastructure available to smaller businesses, optimised for the internet. This used to be surprisingly difficult.

We're certainly not going head-to-head with credit cards, and the system is not suitable for some e-commerce because of the slow payment timings (payments take 2 days to clear). But it's great for regular payments (Hosting, SaaS etc) - long-term regular credit card payment plans typically see 5-10% failure rates, whereas we see in the region of 0.5%.

A physical card is great, but why a static number on the card? Why expose yourself to skimming with a static card number, all these advances in cryptography and we are keeping a 16 digit number on a piece of plastic and sending out new ones when someone knows those 16 digits and a date. I am surprised things like this havent picked up:

http://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2012/01/the-credit-card-that-...

Not even "when someone knows those 16 digits and a date" - that happens as soon as you use it, by definition. It's "when you've observed that someone is abusing that knowledge", which is even messier.

... but, apparently, not messy enough to fix.

This is a great approach to providing that extra internal tool to make the customer experience better and to add data that can be used for future business decisions and marketing. Great idea and execution!

Thanks - we really appreciate it!

Did you evaluate other ticketing packages before developing Nodephone? It looks really slick and the Twilio integration is a great idea.

Hi - I'm Tim from GoCardless, writer of this post.

At the moment, we still use Desk.com for our emails. Here, we were looking for a simple system for tagging our phone calls, but one which could be tightly integrated with our internal services and metrics. We found that the best way to do this was to build our on.

Twilio has been great, offering a huge amount of flexibility to build this how we want to.

Do you have any plans to opensource this/put it on Github or do you regard it a trading secret?

Yes, we probably will open-source; it needs some work before that, though. (I work for GoCardless).

I'm guessing this is the place to check in the future: https://github.com/gocardless

:o)

Tim here, writer of the post.

Indeed. We'd love to open-source it, and I plan to get it to that stage in the long term. The challenge is updating it as so that it's useful for more people and not tied into our internal services and metrics platforms.

Watch this space.

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