Payment processing services firm ILD Teleservices recently rolled out a new Web site for consumers, rather than its LEC customers. The pages tell users more about new capabilities such as bill-to-phone payment, for example. They also provide answers to questions about the charges ILD processes and walks visitors through reporting and resolving billing issues.
And while the site targets typical people, ILD’s service provider clients can use the feedback from the site to improve their transparency to subscribers, their methods and, most of all, showcase service capabilities.
B/OSS Business & Regulatory Editor Kelly Teal spoke on May 27, 2009, with Dennis Stoutenburgh, president of ILD and head of the company’s payment processing division, to learn more about the new site. Here is the edited transcript of that conversation.
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| ILD's Dennis Stoutenburgh |
D.S.: We started seeing a rise in end-user complaints generated mostly by services purchased online, like identity theft protection and voice mail services. It became clear we needed to create mechanisms to protect consumers from unauthorized charges, as well as protect our customers from end-users who were serial subscribers doing fraudulent sign-ups.
B/OSS: Describe the fraudulence and serial subscribing.
D.S. They’d sign up for the service to be delivered to their home but billed to their office. So we were getting tons and tons of these complaints. The people actually worked at these companies but were hoping nobody would read the bills. So we set out on a multiphase plan, [eventually] requiring all customers signing up clients via the Internet to provide the electronic LOA before we would bill an end user.
When we got all those on file, we realized the serial subscriber is a real issue, where an end-user would sign up for the same service from multiple providers. I assume that was because there was an upfront incentive —a gift card or whatever — to do it. So we put out a service — for each category, there’s only one service allowed for each BTN [billing telephone number]. Whoever was the first one to sign up from that number, that’s it.
We then came to the realization that those consumer products were ending up on business bills. So we then scrubbed the entire database to identify the businesses. It’s not likely the local Dairy Queen is going to sign up for an identify theft product, for example. We would take the BTN and find out who the account owner is, take every LOA and if it’s not logical, kick that out and say you have a bad LOA and allow no charge on the bill. We now have a full authentication process.
