I used to have a direct agent account with Cleartel, to sell their local and long distance programs, but they discontinued the service a couple of months ago due to the low quality of web based local phone service customers. What was happening was that customers who couldn’t get service anywhere else, were signing up with Cleartel, and then not paying their bills.

I spent some time going over options with my account manager, but Cleartel didn’t seem to be interested in trying to maintain my affiliate webpage on their site. I told them that they should make each local customer sign up with a credit card, and then charge the card a predetermined amount to make sure it was good. Then they could basically recharge the card everytime the customer’s account hit a predetermined setting based on their credit score and the previous month’s usage. It would have basically created a prepaid local phone service account for customers with low and poor credit scores, and would have made sure that each account stayed in the black.

Since Cleartel removed my affiliate sales page from their site, I signed up with Commission River and started selling Cleartel through them. The bad debt ratio is still pretty high, but they must get enough good customers through all of the agents that Commission River has that it’s worth maintaining the relationship. The funny thing is that I make higher commissions through CR, using the free agent site they gave me,  than I did as a direct agent for Cleartel Communications, so the change was as good, or better, for me, as it was for them.

If you want to become a Cleartel agent and sell their services, I would recomend signing up as a Commission River agent instead of a Cleartel agent. Email me, or post a comment here, if you want to know more.