Hi Dave,
I do not know about what "other" CEOs due, but I take a very personal interest in our customers and in any information exchange regarding NWC, Inc.
I will be happy to answer your questions here; in the order they were posted.
1: As I stated above, I do not know what "other" CEOs do, but I actively seek, research and read any and all informational sources in which NWC, Inc is discussed. In this particular case, this information request was brought to my attention by a current customer of our company. I checked out the link they had sent to me and saw that there was some "questions" about NWC, Inc and decided that it would be best if I address them personally.
2: I agree with your assessment here totally. I'd also like to add that with the ability to spread information about companies today, via the internet that anyone who is not "taking care" of their customers will find that surviving in today’s economy will be near impossible.
3: The two companies in question here are Leasecom and ECX. First, having a little background about these companies I think will be very helpful and a breakdown of the customers who may have had their challenges with these two firms. Leasecom is based in Waltham Mass and is one of the largest leasing companies in the US. They are a reputable and stable business. For approximately a five year period Leasecom had offered a program unheard of in the leasing (or for that matter, any financial industry) business. They were offering guaranteed lease approvals to everyone who applied for a lease, regardless of their credit worthiness.
This is where I believe some of the issues started to arise. Many of the customers who heard about this program and jumped on the bandwagon to get into a business for themselves and to lease a merchant account terminal to start their business simply didn’t do any of their home work (or more technically known as Due Diligence). They simply signed away and thought that they would somehow magically make it in business. What they were signing seems to have been an after thought for many of these people. They were signing a 3 or 4 year non cancelable lease that was enforceable whether or not their businesses survived or not.
Many of these people had extremely low credit scores to begin with and soon realized that even though someone was willing to lease them some equipment that without any other forms of credit they were in for an uphill battle. Many of these people also did not put forth any efforts to make their businesses work including proper marketing efforts and simply started to lodge complaints against the Leasing company, as if they had did something wrong to them. Is having fronted these non creditworthy customers, large sums of money to help them start a business deserving of this bad reputation?
ECX, also known as Ecommerce Exchange is a merchant account company who provides “Ecommerce Services”, as well as gateway and other merchant related services to help small businesses accept credit card payments. In many cases ECX would lease these customers the equipment they needed to get started accepting credit card payments and would use Leasecom to finance the deal, since only Leasecom would finance many of these particularly low credit scoring people.
NWC, Inc simply made customers aware of these two particular companies and the services they offered. While some of your readers may have seen customer complaints against these two sizable companies, what they are not seeing is the many thousands of satisfied customers that have been served by these two enterprises. You simply cannot grow to the size of these two companies (each doing hundreds of millions of dollars in transactions a year) without having a large majority of happy and repeat customers.
4: NWC, Inc continues to strive to satisfy its customers and always will. We will be celebrating our 21st year in business, come September of this year and feel we could not have made it this far and this long without taking care of our most valuable asset, our customers.
Thank you for giving me this opportunity to address your questions and or concerns. I will continue to monitor your board and address any issues or additional questions that may arise.
My direct information is available below, should anyone ever feel the need to contact me directly.
James Polino
CEO
NWC, Inc.,
26 Park Ridge Rd
Haverhill, MA 01835
978-556-800 Fax 978-556-0801
Personal email address ceo@profitbig.com
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