With the recent developments relating to the COVID-19, it has become apparent that many companies will face various challenges due to the amount of chargebacks that they will, or already have, receive(d) in the coming period. As your Payment Service Provider, we will help you with some key insights and best practices, in order to decrease the amount of chargebacks you will receive.
1. Make it easy for people to contact you
Not everyone has the desire to request a chargeback and there can be possibilities to work around it. In order to ensure that you minimize the amount of chargebacks, it is key to make it as easy as possible for customers to contact you first, at all times. Include as many contact options as you can, ideally on various pages of your website. Social media is a great tool in this, many consumers will tend to contact you through social media as their primary option, so make sure that you offer this as a valid point of contact.
2. Engage customers who seek contact, in the right way
Provide your customers with the best customer service possible, especially during these times, as they are just looking for a solution to their problems. Customers will tend to choose the methods of communication that they prefer, but an effort should be made to direct them towards the medium that has the lowest response time and/or costs for you. Depending on your strong suits, emphasize that method of communication.
If your webshop does not offer customer service, or if it isn’t extensive enough, consider looking for a third party who can take care of this for a period.
3. Cancellations over chargebacks
Cancellations aren’t what you want for your webshop, but it is still a better alternative than a chargeback. Look at your current process for cancellations and decide whether or not it is a complicated procedure. No need to make things unnecessarily difficult for your customers.
4. Protect yourself
Chargebacks are connected to either criminal or friendly fraud, or an error on the merchant side of things. These days there are various ways of detecting a potentially fraudulent transaction. One can make use of 3D Secure verification by example. It is of the utmost importance that you have this configured in your webshop, in order to minimize the possibility of criminal fraud in your webshop. Under PSD2 this requirement will be enforced more strictly, read all about PSD2 here and all about 3D Secure 2.0/SCA here.
In conclusion, these times are surely challenging for many different merchants. Getting your basics right has never been more important. By adhering to the rules and regulations that have been put forth by payment networks and ensuring that you can accommodate your consumers where possible, the potential damage of the Coronavirus situation can hopefully be mitigated. Keep in mind however, that many people might be preoccupied with something else right now, meaning they want to have clear and quick responses. Providing great customer support now will be beneficial for you in the long run with the specific consumers and in general with higher ratings on social regarding customer support.
