Reading time: 2 minutes
Risk and fraud management are key activities when running a Product-as-a-Service business. As a best practice, a customer acceptance check has to be performed for every new customer.
Delivering a flawless sign-up experience for your customers matters. In a typical situation, the acceptance check is performed manually after a customer has completed their sign-up. Resulting in a subpar customer experience. The time between completing a sign-up and being accepted as a customer is one of uncertainty. When declined, it leads to extra disappointment.
We have partnered with Focum to provide customer acceptance checks in the Firmhouse platform. During the sign-up process the Firmhouse platform can now automatically request the risk score of a customer. The score will be compared to the acceptable score, configured in the Firmhouse project. When risk score is exceeded, a customer will be automatically declined during the sign-up process.
Knowing your customers is crucial when operating and scaling a Product-as-a-Service business. Not running acceptance checks & risk scores will result in fraud cases, high rates of failed payments, a lot of payment dunning and thus are an operational challenge. Performing acceptance checks lowers the operational pressure on these topics.
More importantly, every scaling Product-as-a-Service business is capital intensive, and one day might need financing. A clear overview of the overall risk score of your customer base increases chances to successfully secure finance options in the future.
The Firmhouse platform offers three different activation strategies. With activation strategies you can determine when you run the background checks, and when a customer is activated as a subscriber.
All customers are automatically accepted and activated. Activation only happens when the first payment of the customer is successfully processed. This activation strategy is perfect for subscription propositions, where the payment covers the the product immediately. For example, when you ship a monthly box of products from your assortment.
After a new customer has signed-up and completed their payment, they will have to be manually activated by you and your team. This is great if you want to check multiple sources of information for customer acceptance. Sources can include both internal and external sources.
Right after the first step during sign-up, we submit the customer information automatically to Focum and perform the background check. The customer will not be able to complete the sign-up when their score exceeds the maximum score you want to accept. This makes for a great customer experience, with a clear answer and no false expectations.
Check out the Acceptence Checks overview for more information on all our options. More integrations and information sources will be added in the coming months, allowing for multiple background checks and richer customer profiles.
Curious how the Focum integration and partnership can benefit you? Contact the team for further details or schedule a demo. Read our press release for further details on the partnerships.
