Shift4 Acquires The Customer Connection, Runs Payments Bro Masterclass

You want to see a Masterclass on how legacy payment companies “create value” to meet the quarter?

Take notes.

Shift4 acquired The Customer Connection, a gift card company (note how the URL reroutes to Shift4), via the acquisition of a MICROS dealer (MICROS Retail) in 2020.

Check out the communication sent to Customer Connection merchants.

Let’s break down the highlights of a good payments bro playbook.

Step 1: Auto opt-in

You must not – cannot – require that the customer approve any material change.

This slows down the steamrolling and invites questions.

Questions are bad.

The customer might start thinking about how these changes could affect their bottom line, and that’s not a good thing.

You attack your enemies under the cover of darkness, amiright?

Also, merchants by and large are illiterate, so there’s that.

Step 2: Distract

Don’t let the truth get in the way of a good sales pitch.

This is straight from the Godfather of payments, Jerridius Isacamanius.

List a bunch of things that anyone with an IQ greater than 100 would know is total nonsense but then remember that you’re dealing with people who can’t count to 100.

Even better if you list numbers larger than 100 because those slack-jawed merchants will be dazzled at your intelligence.

Where possible, include the word “free.” There is no penalty for over-use here, so pretend it’s the only word in your vocabulary.

Step 3: Pain

You really gotta twist that knife to show how much value you’re going to bring.

When the merchant wants to do something unreasonable like look up their accounts payable exposure (how dare they!) to quantify the cost of switching providers after you foist this unilateral change upon them, charge them a ludicrous fee.

Make it so high it’s probably – legally – usury.

The more outrageous, the better.

Remember, you have super high costs for all the value you’re going to provide and the merchant needs to know it!

Wherever possible increase costs to make that pain obvious.

What’s that: you want to breathe?

There’s a fee for that, you piece of sh*t customer!

Step 4: Platitudes

Even though we’re going to treat this “customer” like a hostile enemy and penalize them with economic hardship of unparalleled magnitudes, we still must keep them alive long enough to pay for our never-ending space travel.

So make sure we tell them how VALUED they are.

This is important.

They need to feel it in their bones.

How do you do that?

By opening any communications with the word “valued”.

Remember, these merchants are illiterate and will need to ask a stranger to tell them what our messaging says.

That stranger will not want to spend any more time than necessary in the proximity of someone who eats their own turds.

Therefore, the stranger is likely to read only the first word of the notification and tell the merchant that it’s positive before quickly retreating.

Merchants can only hold one thought mentally, so they’ll anchor on the word “value” and be ecstatic they received your note.

Look, this playbook wasn’t invented overnight.

Something this genius doesn’t just happen.

As proof, here’s live footage of the years of arduous training payment bros invested to understand the needs of their customers.

All you plebes have no idea how hard it is to eschew all vestiges of morality and induce merchants by the thousands so you can pound them as you see fit until they’re economically ruined.

This takes work.

Probably the hardest job on the planet.

Traveling to space every few months is trivial recompense when burdened with the knowledge that you’ve progressed humanity more in 20 years than the 6 billion years years prior.