FAQs

It is easy to make a Verbal Contract by dialing The Contract Genie phone number from any touch-tone phone in the world 24 hours a day. If you can make a three way call, you conference (or flash) in the party that you want to include in your agreement, and start talking. That's it. It's easy.

The equipment records your conversation, and then tells you the Verbal Contract's unique verification code.

That's it. It's really that easy.

A Verbal Contract is a digitally recorded agreement between two or more people. This agreement is digitally recorded on to our equipment both on site and off site so that the parties to the agreement have a permanent, exact copy of their agreement. Each Verbal Contract has a unique verification code, and a time & date stamp.

We also have an online playback system called the Judge. The Judge allows you to access and listen to contracts over the website and make notes about recordings.

The cost is just $.50 per Verbal Contract. This small cost includes unlimited playback.

More and more companies are using Verbal Contracts. Some examples are: Telemarketers that record credit card or check draft authorizations with their customers, newspapers that record advertising contracts with their customers, a bank that records their Visa/MasterCard applications with consumers, a travel agency that records their travel package payment agreements with their clients, a long distance company that records their customers authorization to have their long distance carrier switched, magazine subscription sellers that record their subscribers agreement to pay for their subscriptions, etc. Sellers with multiple locations can centralize their recordings for peace of mind. No data corruption from melt-downs, disgruntled employees and you don't have to pay an IT guy to manage it.

We also cater to vendors who request true third party recording and storage!

Some Verbal Contracts for a simple transaction are less than a minute in length. If there are a lot of disclosures and items that are legally necessary to have included (such as in a credit card application) the typical length is more like 3 to 5 minutes. You decide what items are included in the verbal contract, we record them.

We are not attorneys and do not attempt to give legal advice. If you need legal advice, we suggest you contact a licensed attorney. We can help in a lot of ways but we didn't pass the bar exam.

In general, common sense and clear wording can make your Verbal Contract accomplish its twin purposes of increasing your profits and decreasing misunderstandings. There are other instances where your bank, credit card processor, long distance carrier or other supplier may want to dictate your Verbal Contract's wording to you.

In some cases they are legally necessary. If you are going to take a check over the phone with no signature, new FTC regulations specify that you most have a "verifiable approval". If you are going to switch a customer's long distance carrier from one company to another, most company contracts require that you have a verifiable approval of some type.

In other cases Verbal Contracts are not legally necessary, but they are economically necessary. If you are setting up accounts for a Bank, a credit card company, a travel package etc, and the parent institution requires a written signature or recorded Verbal Contract, it is often prohibitively expensive to get a written signature.

YES!!!!! There are 5 main ways

A. You can take checks over the phone by using Verbal Contracts. There are over twice as many people in the US with Checking Accounts as there are ones with Credit Cards. By taking checks over the phone, you more than double the number of prospective clients. You can stop waiting for the "Check that is in the mail" and get a REAL sale, right now, over the phone. Many of our Clients reports FAR MORE check sales than credit card sales.

B. You can represent or sell products for companies that otherwise would not allow you to represent them. Banks, credit card companies and long distance carriers are examples of three types of large businesses that are represented by our clients. If your telemarketing company wants to represent any company that is concerned with it's image, your use of Verbal Contracts can be the deciding factor in that companies choice of your services. Contract Genie (at your option) can give both your company and your supplier the codes to play back your Verbal Contracts. This way your supplier can audit your transactions to make sure you are accurately representing them.

C. Your customers feel more secure knowing that you are recording the agreement. They are more likely to give out credit card numbers or agree to any transaction if you let them know that all your promises and representations are recorded with an independent third party (Contract Genie).

D. In some cases, you can get a Merchant Account from a bank to take VISA/MasterCard's if you use Verbal Contracts, and that same bank will not grant you a Merchant Account if you don't use Verbal Contracts.

E. When you have someone sold over the phone, the time to finalize the agreement is RIGHT NOW. If you send out a written contract all kinds of things may go wrong so that you never get the sale. The customer can change their mind, move, the mail can get lost, an emergency can come up for the customer, they may decide to go on a vacation or spend the money on a car, a party or spend it with some other company. By doing a Verbal Contract immediately when the customer agrees to buy, you will get far more sales than you will by sending out an agreement for them to sign, or by billing them and hoping they pay.

YES!! Most Verbal contracts are never disputed, but when they are it is a simply wonderful feeling to have them available to quickly play back to a customer. A typical fraudulent or forgetful customer will call you and say "I never authorized that purchase". You then say "Ok Mr. Customer, let's listen to the Verbal Contract". Two minutes later, after the customer hears himself authorizing the purchase, the customer is saying something like "Oh yeah, I forgot about that, thanks for playing that back to me." VISA and MasterCard are both very interested in cutting back their chargebacks, and so are most banks if you are taking checks over the phone. You will have far less chargebacks with Verbal Contracts than without them.

If you are determined to defraud people, Verbal Contracts won't keep you out of jail. However, we have had several clients who, to say the least, were VERY GRATEFUL to have Verbal Contracts to back them up when an Attorney General, Postal Inspectors, and local authorities came busting into their business alleging fraud. However, the Verbal Contracts are a two edged sword. If you are promising more than you are delivering, or fraudulently misleading people, or failing to fulfill, you probably don't want to use Verbal Contracts!

No! We act as a Service Bureau only. We do not listen to your Verbal Contracts, nor permit anyone else to. The information you record in your Verbal Contracts is strictly confidential, and only someone who knows your access code can listen to your account's Verbal Contracts.

We store the Verbal Contracts Online where they are accessible for immediate 24Hr playback for up to two years after they are recorded. We guarantee their availability for 3 years after the date they were recorded. Even though we don't guarantee playback after 3 years, we currently have Verbal Contracts available for up to 6 years. If you need to hear a Verbal Contract which is over 2 years old, call us during regular business hours and we will put that contract back on line for you within 1 hour. Then you can call in and hear that Verbal Contract in the same manner as current ones.

Most clients do not need a copy because we maintain a triple redundant system of backups, and you can always access your verbal's to play them back online or with our phone system.

People that use tape recorders have a much higher failure rate, and tapes are extremely difficult to store, catalog, find, and playback. A decent cassette tape costs more than a verbal contract, and a typical tape player will cost you more sales than our Verbal Contract charge will ever amount to. The tape you absolutely, positively need to playback is assuredly the one that will be erased, lost, missing the label, recorded over, or blank when you NEED to play it back. Tape players take more time to use, are a continuing maintenance expense, and are MUCH less reliable. Tape recorder/storage systems take management time to keep organized, labor cost to keep cataloged, more investment, and they are unreliable! Our Verbal Contract system is VERY easy to use, very reliable, takes almost no investment, and your new employees can use it immediately.

If your Bank or Supplier wants to play back a Contract Genie Verbal Contract to a customer, they can access our Verbal Contract system without your needing to be involved in mailing a tape somewhere. We are an independent third party, and therefore are seen by some institutions as inherently more trustworthy than you playing back a tape that you made.

If you have telemarketers at multiple locations, any of your locations can play back any of your contracts. This is not possible with tapes.

Seriously though, tapes?

Believe it or not, we get asked this question often by prospective competitors. (The real reason is that we just don't know any better!) We believe that at $.50 a Verbal Contract we are selling a Verbal Contract for much less than anyone can provide their own equipment, software, backups, spare equipment, management, phone lines etc.

You don't need to have three-way calling on all of the phones in your phone room. We suggest that you set up two lines that are just for verifications and have three-way put on these phones only. You can do this through your local phone company.