How to Run an Efficient Chargeback Management Team

Hire employees who have the skills and characteristics needed to optimize efficiency. Look for team members who will be:

• DEPENDABLE - Chargeback management timelines are tight. You want to have reliable, productive team members who will be there when you need them.
• ADAPTIVE - Chargeback management techniques should regularly be updated so that results are always improving. Employees need to be willing to adjust workflows as the team’s strategy evolves.
• SELF-MOTIVATED - Chargeback activity ebbs and flows, and an employee’s workload may fluctuate from day to day. Team members need to be able to keep themselves occupied when responsibilities are light.
• ASSERTIVE - Chargeback management should be a collaborative effort. Look for employees who value teamwork and are willing to speak up when they have identified a problem or want to offer a suggestion.
• ANALYTICAL - Data analysis is an important part of chargeback management. Team members need to be willing to dig into the data, establish trends, detect anomalies, and monitor outcomes.
• DETAIL ORIENTED - Chargeback management involves a lot of important tasks that need to be completed accurately and on time. If a single step is missed, your results will suffer. Employees need to stay focused and be attentive to details.

Recognize that your “team” extends beyond the employees who are actively managing chargebacks. It also involves people indirectly associated with payment disputes such as customer support and order fulfillment. Build relationships with other departments and work together to minimize the risk of disputes.

Your chargeback management strategy needs to jive with the broader corporate strategy, so you’ll need top-level buy-in. Executives won’t be involved in the day-to-day operations, but they should be valuable team members when it comes to clearly defining expectations and key performance indicators (KPIs).

Make sure you understand the card brand regulations that are specific to your products or business type. For example, the card brand (Mastercard^®, Visa^®, etc.) rules for a travel merchant are different from those for a restaurant.

Check for processor-specific regulations. Processors usually have strict formatting requirements for chargeback responses. If a response doesn’t adhere to guidelines, it won’t be accepted. You’d invest resources in case that can’t be won. Typically, these expectations are not shared publicly, so you’ll have to ask your processor (if you use Kount to manage your chargebacks, these submission requirements are automatically incorporated into your chargeback response formatting).

Schedule rule reviews. Dispute management rules are occasionally updated, but changes are not always commonly known. You’ll need to make an effort to regularly check for updates. Otherwise, you’ll likely be non-compliant and could be penalized.

Create a plan for training and ongoing education. Outline the information that new employees need, and determine when established team members will need training refreshers. Identify a trusted resource, such as the Kount blog, that team members can consult when they have questions about customer disputes.

Standardize the terminology your team will use. Will you use the term ‘chargeback’ or ‘dispute’? How will you classify a chargeback that wasn’t fought? Will you say ‘did not fight’ or ‘accepted liability’? Make sure everyone is on the same page, because inconsistency can cause confusion.

Decide what your key performance indicators (KPIs) will be. At Kount, we help merchants monitor dozens of different metrics with our in-depth analytics and real time reporting. But at a minimum, we suggest you consider the following KPIs:

• RETURN ON INVESTMENT - ROI is one of the most important metrics to monitor. It compares how much you are able to recover versus how much it costs to fight chargebacks. You want to make sure your efforts are enhancing, and not damaging, the company’s bottom line.
• CHARGEBACK RATIO - Card brands carefully monitor each merchant’s chargeback-to-transaction ratio (CTR) — which compares the number of chargebacks to the number of transactions processed. Breaching established thresholds could mean fees and penalties.
• WIN RATE - Calculating the percent of disputes that are fought and won is a valuable KPI for measuring effectiveness. However, your win rate should be considered within the context of other metrics such as ROI. Otherwise, you won’t have a complete understanding of what you are actually achieving.

Create a strategy to prevent chargebacks. Which chargeback management tools will you use? What level of risk are you willing to accept? How will you evaluate effectiveness?

Create a strategy for fighting chargebacks. Decide which forms of compelling evidence you will collect. Determine how you will format your responses. And establish your fight rules — when you should or shouldn’t fight. Here are some examples of situations where you might not want to respond:

• The disputed amount is small, and it’s not cost effective to respond.
• You don’t have sufficient compelling evidence.
• This chargeback has characteristics that you’ve decided not to fight (a certain reason code, merchant account, product type, sales model, etc.)
• The dispute is legitimate because it was caused by an internal error.
• The submission deadline has passed, and the dispute has expired.
• The processor will not accept a response for a chargeback with this particular reason code

Create a strategy for analyzing data. Each chargeback you receive contains a wealth of information. If you analyze that data, you can gain valuable insights. Determine which KPIs your team should monitor, how often you will review your data, and how you will act upon what you find. (Pro tip: chargeback management software can help ensure your data is accurate and easy to analyze.)

Assign responsibilities and decide who will do what. Will some employees focus on prevention while others fight? Who will analyze the data? Team members can specialize in certain skills and have an area of expertise throughout the chargeback process, but make sure everyone is cross trained so employees can fill in for each other when necessary.

Check to make sure you have access to all the information you need to effectively manage your chargebacks. Sometimes, processors share transaction information in one portal and dispute information in another. You might need to reach out to your processor and request additional login credentials for a second portal.

Get a system in place to consolidate all relevant data, reports, and workflows. Ideally, your team would use a chargeback management service like Kount to make this as efficient and accurate as possible.

Use technology and automation. Manual processes can easily cause unnoticeable errors and increase chargeback costs. Again, consider allowing Kount to help. Our automation and streamlined workflows enable teams to operate with greater efficiency.

Create templates for your chargeback responses. Templates allow you to save the compelling evidence you use most often so you can easily access the information when you need it (Kount’s automation is the easiest way to create and use templates). Repurposing information helps you:

• Decrease the amount of time it takes to complete a dispute response.
• Reduce the likelihood of errors or forgotten information.
• Standardize content so it can be used by multiple team members.
• Check which response strategies have the best win rates.

Adhere to submission deadlines. If you respond outside the time limit, your case won’t be considered and your management efforts will have a negative ROI.

Evaluate your KPIs. Are your goals realistic? Are you measuring what matters most? Are your metrics accurate? Revisit your KPIs every 30 days to see if and how they should be adjusted.

Evaluate overall outcomes. How is your team doing as a whole? Review the impact your efforts have on the company’s bottom line and look for ways to better handle chargebacks.

Evaluate individual outcomes. Which employee has the highest win rate? Who is the most productive? Check to see if there are techniques or strategies that can be shared to improve the effectiveness of other team members.

Audit other departments. Review the processes and policies of other teams that impact chargeback management — such as customer service and fulfillment. For example, does the company’s return policy need an update? Share feedback and work together to enhance the customer experience.