By Rafael Lourenco,
ClearSale
E-Commerce customer service and fraud screening programs can
both get overwhelmed during holiday sales peaks, sometimes in ways that affect
each other. Slow order approvals and automatic false declines can ruin your customers’
experience, while rushed approvals or under-trained customer service can allow
fraudsters to bypass your security measures. Here are four ways to balance
service and security during holiday crunch time.
1. Audit
your site now to reduce routine customer inquiries
Holiday shoppers look for free shipping, want to know for
sure that their orders
will be delivered fast, and want to understand your refund and exchange
policy before they buy. You can make their shopping experience easier and save
your customer service team time by putting a summary of your shipping costs,
holiday shipping cutoff dates and return policy on each page of your site. To
reduce the number of customer inquiries about order progress, you can offer
email and text updates for order tracking. All of these steps free up your
customer service team to handle more complex questions.
Advertisement
2. Consider
adding seasonal customer service support
According to Zendesk, the speed
at which customer service responds to inquiries is directly related to
customer satisfaction, and customer inquiries usually peak during the holiday
shopping season. That means to keep your customers happy, you need to be able
to reply to them fast, even when questions are pouring in. Can your current
staff keep up with the increase? If not, it may be wise to add seasonal
customer support staff or outsource to a third-party CSR service. Having enough
customer service bandwidth gives your team more time to watch out for possible
fraud indicators in their customer interactions.
3. Train
your customer service reps to watch for fraud indicators
Fraudsters know that one way to get around AI tools and
trained fraud screeners is to target front-line customer service
representatives, who usually don’t have the same level of anti-fraud training
that fraud analysts do and who may be under pressure to handle inquiries
quickly and move on. Training all of your CSRs in the nuances of fraud
detection may not be realistic, especially in the short term, but you can put a
process in place for your reps to flag inquiries and refer them to a fraud
analyst or manager. Common scams your customer service team should look out for
include anyone trying to talk their way into accessing
account authentication or password information, and requests for shipping
changes on approved orders such as changing the delivery address, switching to
a carrier suggested by the customer or upgrading from standard to expedited
shipping on approved orders.
4. Outsource
manual review of flagged orders
Automatic rules can screen out clear-cut attempts at CNP
fraud, but relying solely on rules-based screening can lead to one of two
problems: either the settings are so broad that fraud gets through, or they are
so rigid that every order that raises suspicion is rejected. Neither scenario
is good, but the latter could do more damage to your business in the long run.
That’s because many well-to-do shoppers’ orders contain potential fraud flags,
like shipping to another country, ordering from a location outside the
customer’s home country, or high-ticket-value items ordered with rush delivery.
Rejecting these good orders due to strict automatic rules can cost your
business the value of the order plus that customer’s future business, because nearly
a third of these rejected good customers won’t shop with you again after a
false decline.
Even if you have trained staffers who can manually review
flagged orders, the rise in volume during the holiday season can cause
slowdowns in the approval process. That can lead to canceled orders, a rise in
customer inquiries from shoppers who want to know what the holdup is and
reduced customer satisfaction. To avoid this scenario, now’s the time to
consider outsourcing your excess manual review tasks to a third-party team that
can interact with customers in a professional, reassuring way to build
customers’ trust in your store and get good orders approved in a timely way.
Carefully updating your site information now to answer the
most common customer questions, giving your customer service team guidelines on
when to refer customer inquiries to fraud screeners, and adding
customer-service and manual-review capacity through seasonal hires or
outsourcing can pay off for your business in several ways this holiday season.
Your good customers will have a more satisfying shopping experience, even if
they place orders that raise flags for possible fraud. Your store will be
better protected from fraud tactics that exploit weaknesses in customer service
training. You’ll lose less revenue to false declines, and because your
customers will be taken care of well, they’re more likely to shop with you
again after the holiday season ends.
Rafael
Lourenco is Executive Vice President at ClearSale,
a Card-Not-Present fraud prevention operation that helps retailers increase sales and
eliminate chargebacks before they happen. The
company’s proprietary technology and huge in-house staff of seasoned analysts
provide an end-to-end outsourced fraud detection solution for online retailers
to achieve the highest approval rates industrywide while virtually eliminating
false positives. Follow on twitter at @ClearSaleUS.
