If you are providing expensive equipment, you risk a lot of value to be lost if the customer turns out to be a fraud or a customer without a sound financial position.
In that case you might want to perform background checks on every new customer to ensure their credibility. In our platform, we call this acceptance checks.
We currently offer you two ways of performing acceptance checks: An automated check using Focum and/ or a manual acceptance check based on criteria you set yourself.
This article covers the following things:
Enabling acceptance checks for your project
Creating acceptance checks
Activating customers once your sets have been set up
Enabling acceptance checks for your project
First you have to enable it for your project. Head over to Subscription Model Settings and scroll down to Acceptance checks. Make sure to set it up as followed:
Under the Activation Strategy select 'Perform acceptance check first'
Don't forget to press "Update project" in the top right.
This will ensure that one (or several) acceptance checks can be performed before a customer can be activated. Based on the results of these acceptance checks you can then decide to accept or decline a customer.
Good to know:
Acceptance checks happen after the initial signup / payment. As your third-party service (like Focum) will charge you for every background check, this ensures that you will only get charged for customers that show a serious intent of subscription to your service.**
By having acceptance checks set up on your project, you will have to manually accept/decline every new sign up, even if you're using an automated check.
**You can also decide to set up your acceptance check upon sign up. You'll find details on how to implement that here.
Creating your acceptance check
Once you have enabled acceptance checks, you will see a menu in the sidebar called "Acceptance checks". There you can create your acceptance checks.
Decide what kind of acceptance check to set up
First you want to decide what kind of check to create
Manual: Choose this is if you want to perform a manual acceptance check that can't be automated. A common example is to double check if a customer is on an internal blocklist. Such a task would happen manually, outside of Firmhouse (by checking an internal spreadsheet/system). By setting it up inside of Firmhouse you can create an audit trail for every customer.
Focum (Automated acceptance check): We provide an integration with Focum (https://www.focum.nl/) to perform automated background checks. Once configured on your project, they will evaluate the financial credibility of every sign up.
Setting up a manual acceptance check
There's not much you need to do here. Give it a name and decide when a customer should pass. Examples:
"Is on internal blocklist?" -> Set to NO
"Passed manual screening" -> Set to YES
Press save and you're good to go.
Setting up an acceptance check with Focum**
You will first be asked to connect to Focum by providing your username and password
Choose which environment to use: We advise you to initially set it to "Test". Once you have performed some tests and confirm everything is working, set it to "Live"
The maximum score: This determines the maximum risk for a customer to be accepted using a customers profile determined by Focum. The result is generated on a scale between 1 and 2; either the risk is low/normal or there is a high risk.
**If you wish to use Focum please reach out to Firmhouse Support to verify your configuration settings.
Combining acceptance checks
You can add as many acceptance checks as you want. It's important to note that every customer will have to go through all of your acceptance checks before they can be activated.
In this example setup, there would first be an automated check performed by Focum. A customer will then have to pass an additional manual check before they can be activated:
You're all set up! Now learn how to activate a customer.
Good to know: If you add a new check it will only be performed on new signups. All existing customers will not be affected by it and will remain activated.
Removing an acceptance check
Use the "Remove" button to remove an acceptance check. Please note that doing so will result in all previously gathered acceptance check values on customers to be removed as well.
Activating customers
Once a new sign up comes in, locate it in your Customers view. You can tell that a customer needs activation if the status is set to "inactive".
Pro tip: Use the filter above the table to only display customers that are Inactive
On the customer view, scroll down to Acceptance checks. There you will able to see the risk score that Focum has assigned to the customer. If no risk score was assigned, check back later. It can take some time. If no risk score has been assigned after a few hours, double check your Focum settings or get in touch with us.
If you have set up a manual check you can now perform that check.
If all checks have passed you will be able to activate the customer! In any other case you can reject the customer.
