S
Stirgus CreditRepair
Previously, we gave clients a 30-day free trial (this was our policy for over 6 years and this is why we stood out). Sadly, CHS charges the client $1, then again in 7 days. This confuses so many clients (although its clearly listed on our website and agreement), and this made us change our service plan to 7 day free trial to match CHS billing structure.
Although this solves the money issues, it's still becoming an inconvience during onboarding, when clients have to sign up for CHS. Some complain about having to retype all of their info in all back over again, some have credit card issues (since CHS is strict about billing zip codes being correct), some think CHS is just an "extra feature" and isn't associated with our service (again, it's literally written all over our site). Eventually, clients change their passwords later on, then we have to reach out so many times to get the newest password, sometimes their billing goes inactive with CHS but not ours and we never find out until it's time to import (so much time wasted having to contact them to update billing with CHS and they seem confused or have no idea what CHS is).
It's time to step things up and add this as a business expense:
  1. Let's be honest, clients do not care about "credit monitoring", they only care about credit repair. Clients are trained to understand updates are every 30 days and there will be no changes until we review their 30-day credit reports and import them.
  2. How about CRC find a way to step down CHS plan to ONLY providing credit reports every 30 days and charge the CRO for each credit report that's pulled. We can then mark up our service fee to include this and the client don't have to enter their credit card in all back over again for CHS. Honestly, it would be a bonus if CRC invented their own credit report system that gives us access to our clients credit reports the second they hand over their SSN and info when filling out the sign up form (im sure there will still be some sort of text code sent to the client to verify their identity, thats fine).
  3. Reactivating clients is such a pain! When old clients return, we have to manually send them our affiliate link and we have no idea if they signed back up for CHS. We have to then continue calling them to ask if they've completed it and what's their new password. If we were just charged a small fee for each time we accessed their 30-day reports, onboarding and reactivation would go so much faster, along with monthly updates, by not stressing if the client paid for CHS.
I know CHS has sponsor codes, but this only works for 50 clients at a time and would be 10x more confusing for clients because half of them will forget to enter the sponsor code. Plus, the sponsor code CHS being $15 upfront is a bit much, if we're not charging the client until after their 7 day trial is over. This could lead to misleading pricing and CROA violations, by charging upfront fees. The other thing I dont like about CHS sponsor code is that we'll still be charged for credit monitoring regardless, even if the client requested for a payment date changed and we'll be getting hundreds of seperate transactions to our business card, which could flag our bank. We prefer to get billed at the end of the month or at least weekly.....or by adding funds to our CRC account, just for credit reports.