When ILD Teleservices name or logo appears on a consumer’s phone bill, it means that the consumer may have purchased a product or service from a merchant who utilizes ILD’s Bill to Phone service, and then authorized the charge for that product or service to be sent to his or her home phone. It also means that the merchant that sold the product or service to the consumer has hired ILD to forward the charge to the consumer’s phone bill. Many merchants outsource the processing of credit card payments, and ILD is a leading outsource services provider within the communications and technology markets for phone billed payments.

For more information on bill to phone payments or if you have a question about your bill, visit ildteleservices.com.

Cramming is the placement unauthorized or misleading charges on a telephone bill. We strongly condemn and do not participate in “cramming”, so if you feel you’ve been crammed or you simply do not recognize a charge, please call us at 800-637-4009 or send us an email to askild@ildmail.com.

Like any bill, it’s important to closely review your phone bill each and every month because whether it’s your phone bill, credit card statement, electric or cable, sometimes charges end up on your bill that you should question. Your phone bill should be treated like any other purchase you make, so take a few minutes each month and closely review all of the charges, just like you do with your bank statement and credit card statements.

Here’s some great advice, courtesy of the FCC, on how to protect yourself and save money.

· Ask yourself the following questions as you review your telephone bill:

1) Do I recognize the names of all the companies listed on my bill?

2) What services were provided by the listed companies?

3) Does my bill include charges for calls I did not place and services I did not authorize?

4) Are the rates and line items consistent with the rates and line items that the company quoted to me?

· You may be billed for a call you placed or a service you used, but the description listed on your telephone bill for the call or service may be unclear. If you don’t know what service was provided for a charge listed on your bill, ask the company that billed the charge to explain the service provided before paying the charge.

· Make sure you know what service was provided, even for small charges.

· Keep a record of the telephone services you have authorized and used – including calls placed to 900 numbers and other types of telephone information services. These records can be helpful when billing descriptions are unclear.

· Carefully read all forms and promotional materials – including the fine print – before signing up for telephone or other services to be billed on your phone bill.

· Companies compete for your telephone business. Use your buying power wisely and shop around. If you think that a company’s charges are too high or that its services do not meet your needs, contact other companies and try to get a better deal.

Actions You Can Take if You Suspect That You’ve Been Crammed

If unknown or suspicious charges are listed on your telephone bill then immediately call the company that charged you for calls you did not place, or services you did not authorize or use. If the charges appear on the ILD Teleservices page of your phone bill, then call us at 800-637-4009 and we can help to explain the charges. You can also request an adjustment to your bill for any incorrect charges.

The ILD booth continued to see large amounts of traffic on Tuesday and Wednesday. We were excited to see some of our existing customers and phone company vendors like Verizon. It was great to educate people stopping by on alternative phone billing and adding the Bill to Phone option to their checkout process. Attendees learned about our new site www.ildteleservices.com, a convenient way for people with problems to resolve them. As we walked around the conference floor it was amazing to see how many people would Tweet or would be looking at something on their cell phone. We also had several Matthew Lesoko sightings (the exuberant guy who wears question mark suits) on Tuesday. As the conference comes to an end we would like to thank everyone who stopped by ILD Teleservices in booth 222 and helped to make our trip to Boston a great experience.

From the showroom floor (Internet Retailer Conference & Exhibition)…..

Monday 6/15: The show opened with a splash and was very well attended. The ILD booth was buzzing with online merchants interested in learning how they could improve their cart abandonment rate using our Bill to Phone as a supplemental payment option for their customers. Many attendees had not heard of the phone bill payment option and learned quickly how simple a proces it is. It was exciting to meet with companies like IMN (iMakeNews), a customer of ILD’s Conferencing division, as well as our very entertaining Canadian neighbors Grant and Stuart from SCI Logistics, GivAClick, Lexis Nexis, EmailDirect.com and many more.

Looking forward…

Tuesday: We will be heading to different workshops. In between these workshops we are excited to promote the Bill to Phone payment option, affording businesses revenue lift without upfront expenses.

More to come from Boston soon….

Internet Retailer Conference & Exhibition is named as America`s largest and fastest growing trade show after becoming the world`s largest e-retailing conference. IRCE has been growing consecutively for four years, and this year, we are delighted to be exhibiting at IRCE 2009 for the first time!

The Expo starts this coming Monday June 15, 2009 in Boston. Our CEO and Chairman, Mike Lewis, ILD’s President and COO, Dennis Stoutenburgh, Dwight Point, VP of Sales, Karen Mitchell, Dir. Sales, Dave Hanron, VP of ILD’s Outsourced and Call Center Services, and me, Ilona Olayan, Dir. of Marketing will be there to meet you personally.

At our booth, #222 (across from GiveAClick), we will be presenting some of our new and exciting alternative payment solutions and special offers for service providers – including our new Information and Entertainment Transaction Billing (IETB) for the phone bill. ILD Teleservices will proudly present its bill to phone payment service for clients looking to create revenue lift. We also have a US based call center fully equipped to handle all customer service inquiries.

We would like to invite you to visit us at the IRCE 2009 to learn about how ILD Teleservices phone billing option can help your business grow – chat with ILD’s Payment Processing team!

Ilona

Who provides better information, the actual source or some third party informant? As society becomes more involved with the Worldwide Web, we continue to have a major thirst for information. We are more focused on the social aspect of life and how we get our information.

At ILD we want to allow our customers, prospects, and merchants to follow what we are doing on a daily basis and provide them another platform to communicate with us. Our blog and FAQ section will always be filled with useful information to those who are lost or need guidance. Next we will be updating our groups on Facebook and LinkedIn so that we can provide you with the most up to date information. Follow us on Twitter, too. We would enjoy extending invitations to anyone on these social networks who would like to follow us as we expand our business and the ways in which you can pay for services online, by using your phone bill.

The participation by the ILD staff in the Shine in ’09 campaign was great. So good, that all of our offices won. Our San Antonio office wanted to celebrate by having a party at Dave and Busters.

There was great food, karaoke entertainment, and fun had by all. At the party Merced Aguilar (one of our lead agents) and Jennifer O’Connor (Workforce Supervisor, SA Office) were chosen to be the king and queen. They were voted on by their peers for engaging their co-workers and getting everyone in the spirit for he Shine in ’09 celebration. Their energy and karaoke skills solidified their spots as the King and Queen.

We recently launched a campaign to help refocus and revitalize our company environment for the upcoming year.  Taking a look around we noticed things were a bit outdated – more than outdated if you count files laying around from more than a decade ago.  So, we came up with a creative and productive project to renew ILD’s image.  Our employees formed teams/ groups, a budget, and competed for prizes following these guidelines:

1 – Establish a Theme

· Express the depth of our team and our team’s commitment to our customers
· Demonstrate a professional and goal oriented environment
· Illustrate the professional successes of our company and each other
· Display common goals (charts and graphs) and publicly track progress towards those goals
· Motivate and inspire!

2 – Establish Teams and Rules

· Set a start and end date
· Create 4 teams across our 5 offices, based on business and location
· Each designated division will select a “Captain” who will then determine, based on that location’s needs, the specific goals (i.e., customer satisfaction, employee satisfaction, organization)
· Committee meetings must be kept to a maximum of 2 one hour meetings per week and individual time spent on reorganizing should be at the discretion of the supervisor
· Each team must take before and after photos and provide to members who are excluded from the contest
· Upon conclusion of contest, the executive team will visit each office to judge improvements

3- Set an equal budget for each team

· The funds can be used for any improvements that the division/location would like to make (furniture, furnishings, framed charts, awards, etc.)

Because of the hard work and impressive efforts by ILD’s employees, the judges decided that all offices should win the prize of their choice.  Over the course of the next week, we’ll show you some of the before and after shots of the offices and show you how each office celebrated, starting with ILD Teleservices’ customer service team in San Antonio. 

We recently launched a campaign to help refocus and revitalize our company environment for the upcoming year. Taking a look around we noticed things were a bit outdated – more than outdated if you count files laying around from more than a decade ago. So, we came up with a creative and productive project to renew ILD’s image. Our employees formed teams/ groups, a budget, and competed for prizes following these guidelines:

1 – Establish a Theme

· Express the depth of our team and our team’s commitment to our customers
· Demonstrate a professional and goal oriented environment
· Illustrate the professional successes of our company and each other
· Display common goals (charts and graphs) and publicly track progress towards those goals
· Motivate and inspire!

2 – Establish Teams and Rules

· Set a start and end date
· Create 4 teams across our 5 offices, based on business and location
· Each designated division will select a “Captain” who will then determine, based on that location’s needs, the specific goals (i.e., customer satisfaction, employee satisfaction, organization)
· Committee meetings must be kept to a maximum of 2 one hour meetings per week and individual time spent on reorganizing should be at the discretion of the supervisor
· Each team must take before and after photos and provide to members who are excluded from the contest
· Upon conclusion of contest, the executive team will visit each office to judge improvements

3- Set an equal budget for each team

· The funds can be used for any improvements that the division/location would like to make (furniture, furnishings, framed charts, awards, etc.)

Because of the hard work and impressive efforts by ILD’s employees, the judges decided that all offices should win the prize of their choice. Over the course of the next week, we’ll show you some of the before and after shots of the offices and show you how each office celebrated, starting with ILD Teleservices’ customer service team in San Antonio.

According to a poll performed by CyberSource, merchants who accept four types of payments (PayPal, credit cards, online checks, and Bill to Phone) have more customers convert than those merchants with a single payment option. The conversion rate is 20% higher for merchants with several payment options.

“Adding payment types can be effective because the Internet is now reaching well beyond the early adopter. We’re hitting different demographics now; people who may prefer not to use credit cards and people who don’t have them. Others simply prefer the convenience of an alternative payment method for a single transaction.” -Doug Schwegman, CyberSource director of customer and market intelligence.

Reach more of your customers by using ILD Teleservices’ Bill to Phone billing. Increase your conversion rate and expand your customer base. For more information click here.

Article on Alternative Payments