That issue is how to define the customer of a company that provides a service on behalf of another company.
We went to the homepage of the company from the above post and received the following welcome screen:
You can see a popup in the center, with the homepage dimmed in the background. The popup is addressed to members of the "healing professions" and invites them to inquire about the company's payment processing services.
We could not possibly have asked for a better answer to the question "who is the customer?"
This leads to the next question: technically, the company is an intermediary, can we find the "other customers" on the website?
The answer is "no".
The website is designed exclusively for those who employ the company as their billing provider. The people who pay the invoices, those who actually send the money have no place on the site. Even the slogan under the logo in the upper left hand corner is addressed to the profession, loosely translated it says "our service goes into your account", where account means bank account.
We then went through the menus on the right and found a paragraph describing their basic structure and what they do. It is in German but we will highlight the main points.
Die RZH ist eine Tochtergesellschaft der ARZ Haan AG. Zusammen mit unseren Schwestergesellschaften, der ARZ Service GmbH und der AZH-Abrechnungszentrale für Hebammen GmbH, erbringen wir an insgesamt 6 Standorten in Deutschland für ca. 10.500 Kunden monatliche Abrechnungsdienstleistungen mit Mehrwertleistungen. Nicht zuletzt von dieser gemeinschaftlichen Kompetenz im Gesundheitswesen profitieren unsere Kunden, wenn es um schnelle, kompetente und vertrauensvolle Durchführung aller Abrechnungsprozesse geht.
They says they have around 10 500 customers who entrust their monthly billing and value added services to the company. They also mention their parent company and sister companies. This last statement should give any MBA pause because the staffing numbers found elsewhere (around 290 for RZH) do not necessarily indicate the need for a complex company structure. Given that we are dealing with medical billing and the complexities of a modern health care system, nested small-ish billing companies could be deemed counter productive from the position of the insurance companies. But that's not the main point.
The main point is that RZH is either unaware of their role as an intermediary, having two distinct groups of clients, or someone has decided to leave out the end customer (b2c) and put all their effort on the b2b side of the house.
The company's service is, according to the German blurb above, "fast and competent" and they are "trustworthy".
Not if the invoice provided in "Incompetence or Rip-off?" truly originates from them. We talked to some German friends and found that there are fraudsters who buy medical insurance information and then send fabricated invoices for small co-payment amounts to people in the assumption that people will frequently simply pay and not question or research the validity of an invoice.
From our perspective, companies such as RZH may be partly to blame for the ease with which fraudsters operate because the legitimate service companies offer no online validation to the patients.
Setting up an online verification system would be extremely simple. Shipping companies like FedEx have been doing tracking for at least a decade, and any billing company could easily do the same.
Shipping companies are an intermediary par excellence. They typically work on behalf of a merchant or producer and deliver to an individual or company. No modern shipping company can survive without without offering tracking.
If you let people query an invoice using at least the invoice number and the full name of the recipient, you have a pretty secure system. You could, for good measure, ask the user to enter the name of the company that provided the service or supplies.
Why this is not being done eludes us.
Selecting a payment provider:
1) Remember the main point: you are handing over part of your business. If your payment provider messes up, your customer may go elsewhere.
2) Look into how the candidate interfaces with your customer. These days, the absence of automated email confirmation should send you running to a human bookkeeper.
3) If they do not offer a tracking or online verification to the recipients of your bills, again, run.
4) If your business is in a country where bank transfers are the preferred mode of payment, does the provider offer preprinted transfer (SEPA) forms? Preprinted, detachable forms reduce the number of errors caused by manual copying of the payment information. If the provider does not offer this feature, run.
5) Does the payment provider have a call center staffed on all days of postal mail delivery? Trust me, you do not want a confusing invoice from a provider the end user does not know delivered on a Saturday without a human available to answer questions.
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