Payment Powerhouse

Illuminating Strategies for ISO Partner Sales

Independent Sales Organizations (ISOs) sell payment processing services to merchants on behalf of a processor, but how do they determine what to sell? This research project led to a new plan for the ISO channel moving forward. The driving question:

How can we increase Clover sales to merchants in the ISO channel?

This was a huge strategy-defining project that included a number of smaller research questions. This made it necessary to break out our goal into several sub-questions and bring it all together to understand:

•What are the touchpoints between our internal teams and our ISO partners?

•What factors influence a partner’s and/or a merchant’s decision to go with us vs. a competitor and vice versa?

•What, if any, patterns have ISOs identified on why merchants choose to go with a competitor vs. us?

•What is the current setup experience for merchants who come in through the ISO channel?

•How are ISOs helping their merchants set up?

•What is the ideal experience for net new merchants using our devices when setting up? In their first 90 days? During ongoing use?

Understanding ISOs

To start, I needed to understand what an ISO was, and how the channel worked.

I started with 19 interviews with 24 internal team members to understand the moving parts of the channel and how the teams all interacted. This ranged from folks in sales to finance to operations. I created a service blueprint to show how all the pieces interacted from start to finish

Next, I interviewed 13 different partners from different kinds of ISO organizations, talking to their sales teams, their business leadership, and their operations groups.

After talking to internal teams and partners, I put together archetypes for each role to identify their role and needs

Mapping the ISO Experience

Now that I understood the process and the people, I put together a journey map to present to leadership.

Illuminating Insights

Out of the interviews that I conducted, I identified six primary important insights that might have bearing on sales. These were divided into the Sales & Onboarding, and the Ongoing Support part of the journey.

Sales & Onboarding

I discovered that our ISOs needed more education, greater access to demo devices, and that some merchants simply don’t get the functionality they need with our devices.

Ongoing Support

I also found that ISOs found calling in to Support embarrassing, that they were ill-equipped to provide their own white-glove support, that partners had no visibility into the status of their support requests, and that support team members had way too many tools to use in order to help merchants solve their issues.

Ideating & Driving Towards Solutions

In order to address the pain points I had uncovered, I provided leadership with several design directions. These were then the jumping-off point for ideation sessions I conducted with members of all of the internal teams I had interviewed to ensure a diverse perspective on the issues. We brainstormed, clustered, and prioritized, and came up with the following ideas, for some of which I created prototypes as applicable:

Directions & Ideas

Allow partners to compete with lower-cost hardware competitors

Due to this insight, the company developed a low-cost, entry-level terminal for small mom and pop merchants that launched in 2024.

Provide functionality tailored towards fine dining

This was a major point for the leadership team, and ties into the overall strategy of working with a new software-provider acquisition.

Position the ISO as the solution-provider for the merchant

Prevent competition with company website pricing

We suggested creating tailored websites for our partners and remove pricing from our site, as well as promote our partners on our own website.

Make demo devices accessible for training and sales

Partners expressed that having access to demo devices allowed them to increase sales to merchants, as well as train their new agents. The team thought that to avoid taking a loss on demo devices, we could do it digitally with a web-based GUI.

Give partners and merchants visibility into status of support issues

A huge concern for our partners was knowing what is happening with their merchant after they call into Clover support. As part of the ideation process, we came up with a new “Inquiries” tab built directly into the partner’s Clover dashboard to provide visibility into open and resolved support cases.

Enable partners to be effective as the merchant’s primary source of support

This was a big win for us, as the product team has been developing a new feature to allow remote access for partners to their merchant’s Clover dashboard so they can do their own troubleshooting. This validated a long-term, large-lift project, and helped to drive investment into the initiative.

Make it easier for support agents to find the information they need to efficiently resolve merchant issues during the first call

This insight led to the development of a new AI function in the support agent’s portal that helps them to find the correct information to resolve a merchant’s issue, significantly cutting down on the call time.

Wrapping Up

This research project drove the development of several new products and operational models, and was used as the basis of a new channel strategy for the company. It has had a large impact on the business channel, leading to greater satisfaction for our users, and an increase in sales, just as we’d hoped.