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The following is a transcript of the podcast episode.
Brian Riley, Director, Credit Advisory Service at Mercator Advisory Group
Welcome to our session today. Today’s call is with Allen Pettis, who’s a 32-year veteran at TSYS. I’ll tell you, Allen, I’ve been around the card world for a while myself and I’ve been to TSYS over the years several times, and one of my big memories there is one of the original machines that is in the lobby of the building and that always brings a good chord and really gives a perspective on the depth of TSYS in the card business. I’d like to start with asking you what have you seen over the last 32 years and in the business and how do you think things are evolving?
Allen Pettis, Executive Vice President and Chief Customer Officer of Issuer Solutions at TSYS
I’ll be glad to do that. As you said, I have been here for quite some time and have had the opportunity to work in many areas at TSYS. I actually started out as a machine operator although I didn’t run the machine that you saw in our lobby. That’s a little bit before my time, but not that much before my time. I have worked running a machine. I’ve run our output services area, which was the area that does all of our statement and card production. I’ve been in the commercial care arena. I’ve managed our large clients. I’ve had affiliate operations, where I’ve managed things like our loyalty business and our legacy prepaid business. And then I’ve moved over and been in the client-facing business for many, many years. And today I am the chief customer officer at TSYS, and I manage all of the business functions and client-facing functions worldwide. I handle all of our client relationships. I’ll tell you that over the years what I’ve seen at TSYS is a lot of changes as it relates to technology and process and the way we do things. But one thing that’s been steadfast at TSYS is our dedication to superior client service and over the years that’s taken different shapes. I can remember when I started we didn’t even know what an SLA or a KPI was. We didn’t have a lot of service-level agreements, but through the years we’ve matured and gotten those. Then from there we’ve gone to more of a proactive stance with our clients. And today we’re working really hard at becoming what we call a trusted advisor to our clients. Really getting ahead of those guys, delivering solutions for those guys before they actually ask for them, and working to be proactive and more consultative in our stance.
So, a lot has changed. We’ve gone from what you saw in our lobby to today, machines that can actually take a blank piece of plastic, print the logo, print the card, do all the graphics, put the chip in it. But again, our secret sauce has always been our people and our dedication to customer service.
Brian Riley
Sure. And that trusted advisor component is important and we hear the words “concierge commerce” bubbling up, and that certainly has a broad definition to it, but it falls into several tranches, things like connectivity and interaction with customers, payments, and relevance. What’s your spin on that? How do you think it fits into today’s world?
Allen Pettis
I think it’s extremely important. When I’m dealing with our clients, we try to remind those folks of, and I use my family as an example — my mother is 70, I’m 50, and my daughter is 20, and we all like to be handled differently when it comes to customer service. What’s important, though, is having the continuity of that customer service throughout those channels. So again, like you talked about — chat, voice call, text, things like that — I want to be able to continue a conversation and pick up where I left off without having to provide my credentials again, give my account number again. Do things like that: Take the friction out of the process, and that’s with anything, whether it’s old-school voice customer service or whether it’s today — using my daughter as an example, she thinks it’s atrocious that you have to talk to somebody if you call customer service; she wants to do it all on her phone, just texting or chatting or what have you. I think it’s very important, that people really understand their client base and who they deal with. I’ll give you an example. Recently in my world, I’ve just moved, and I’ve got a new cable provider. I had an issue and it took me about 20 minutes to get through everything I needed to where I could finally talk with somebody, and that was very frustrating for somebody like me because I didn’t want to chat, I didn’t want to text, I wanted to talk because it was not a cut-and-dry conversation in my mind. There were a lot of things that I needed answers for so that I could provide a different question. And it was not a good experience. I think the better our clients know, and the better we enable them to know, their client base, the better they can actually create that customer service experience around those particular clients. One experience I had on the opposite side that was really great is I called one of our services here that we use at TSYS and talked for about 5 minutes, got my problem resolved. And when I was done, the lady said, “I want you to know you’ve been recorded the entire time and from now on when you call, your voice will be the way we actually know who you are and recognize you and authenticate you.” And I think that is tight. That blew me away. That’s where we need to get, and that’s where our customers need to get — where when you hang up, you say, “Wow, that was a really good experience.”
Brian Riley
Customer experience is essential, and that’s why we’re here. Can you tell me about life as a TSYS customer and what kind of customer experience you think they’d expect?
Allen Pettis
Again, I go back and they expect the same thing out of us that that their customers expect out of them. They want consistency. They want to have their problems resolved immediately, and if not, they want updates. We’ve worked really hard on this because I’ll tell you, if you go back again in the history of TSYS, like I said, we’ve always delivered what we consider superior customer service. Years ago that meant being the best firefighter or the best one to react to a certain issue. Today that is not what our customers want, and that’s not what they need. It’s been quite frankly a little bit of a struggle for us, and we’ve had to really look at our talent to make sure we’ve got the right people in the right roles. We’ve had to look at our training. We’ve had to look at our programs on how we pay and how we incent folks. So we’ve gone through a lot of that, and I will tell you that our customers are noticing that. We’ve spent a lot of time surveying these guys. Historically we would get questions and answers and things that were around “You’re not consultative enough. Why can’t you deliver projects faster?” All that tone and tenor has changed. Our recent survey we did with our customers, they came back and said, “We really like your roadmaps. We like the direction you’re headed.” Our client rep now talks more about strategic items rather than things that happened on an SLA report. So, really what they’re wanting us to do is help them drive their business. And what we’ve tried to do is explain to our team members that the more we drive our customers’ business, the more it drives our TSYS business. So the client experience again. TSYS is a broad organization, and our clients deal with quite a few different inputs and different points of entry into TSYS. And we want to have a seamless experience no matter whether they’re dealing with a commercial card or consumer card or they’re dealing with a loyalty resource or an implementation. We want that client experience to be the same for them across that entire footprint, and that’s something work really, really hard for.
Brian Riley
That makes a lot of sense. As things evolve and you start expanding, the capabilities kind of get more complicated in the expectations. What do you think is the trickiest element to balance between new payment methods and environments, friction the customers are experiencing, and so forth?
Allen Pettis
Well, I had a customer say this to me, and it’s really stuck: “There are no line items on our bill for security, for reliability, for resiliency.” The things that really keep the client’s business up and running, we don’t really have a line item that we actually bill for those, and quite frankly that’s table stakes. That’s like turning on a light switch and you expect the light to work. So you got to make sure that as we’re going through all of these new technologies and these new experiences we don’t lose focus on the things that make our clients successful and the things that have made TSYS successful. At the end of the day, you can do all the things right, but if you don’t authorize the card or the client doesn’t get the right experience when they call in, all that’s for naught. So we work really hard to balance new and innovative ideas and technologies and services and products with resiliency, stability, security, making sure we’re doing all the things we need to do to be reliable for our customers. And that’s not always easy, in particular when you introduce third parties into it, where you’re bringing in a fintech or things like that. So we’re really evolving on that front, but we’re working really hard on that and utmost of importance to us is being able to deliver a consistent client experience for our customers.
Brian Riley
Apart from the in-house innovation and partnerships you talked about, looking at how some of the acquisitions have been expanding, what’s been your experience of how the whole vision of the company is changing from say where it was 5 years ago, 10 years ago, or 20 years ago?
Allen Pettis
Well, I think a lot has changed, as you said. We’ve made some pretty bold acquisitions. When we bought Netspend, that put us in a direct consumer market. That was something we had never done before, and it’s actually helped us in issuing because it’s given us another channel and another offering that we can actually provide to our issuing clients. But what it’s also done is given us a perspective now of being the provider at firsthand to a consumer financial services, so we get a lot of feedback from our partners at Netspend. We’ve really grown our acquiring business, and again almost all of our customers are looking for some sort of an acquiring solution. So we work very closely with our acquiring partners when it comes to our banks and our financial institutions that we deliver services to on the issuing side. Now what I will tell you from an issuing perspective is, is that we are really taking a different tack, where now we are looking at partnering more with third parties instead of building it on our own. And again, that’s tricky because when you bring in these fintechs, they don’t have a lot of capital, they don’t have a lot of stability. We’ve got to help prop them up. And then if they do scale, then you have the whole thing around scrutiny as it relates to auditors, as it relates to regulators, all those folks start getting involved as it scales. So we’re really working very closely and handpicking who we actually do business with as it relates to these third parties we bring in. And then it’s sometimes difficult when the customer, our customer, sees that we’re bringing a third party in and then contractually they want us to stand in the gap and stand behind these guys, and we have to work through that contractually with our customers. So it’s a balancing act. Our customers want speed, they want us to get to market fast, but then they also say but, by the way, we want all the ironclad guarantees we get with TSYS with these small fintech companies that we’re bringing in to help accelerate our growth. So we’re getting there. We’re working really hard with these guys. We got a good message around it. We’ve had a couple of success stories. Most of the time, these folks will tell you they’re multi-tenant. What we consider multi-tenant, and what they consider multi-tenant doesn’t always match. So we’ve had those types of discussions, and we’ve had those type of issues. But every time we partner with one we learn something so we add it to our list and when we go to the next one we know to look for it. So it’s getting better and better.
Brian Riley
Sure. It’s like raising kids: You’re known by the company you keep. Well, thank you so much. Anything else you’d like to add before we sign off?
Allen Pettis
I would just say, here at TSYS we do all the right things around technology. We do all the right things around our product suites. But what we pride ourselves on is delivering superior customer service to our clients, and that’s what we built this business on, and I would say you would see us continue to do that on a day in and day out basis.
Brian Riley
Terrific. Well, thank you so much, Allen.
Allen Pettis
You’re welcome.
