The customer experience does not end with the sale
Your business provides an excellent frontend customer experience, with intuitive shoppability for locating items, colors, sizes – whatever the customer needs to make their selection and seamlessly move through a smooth, secure checkout. Just as important, however, is the post-transaction experience you deliver. This potentially is the difference between keeping the sale or having it end in a chargeback, with not only the loss of the sale, but also potentially the customer, as well. Providing digital receipts by email is a good first step sellers can take to save the sale and the relationship. When customers have questions about their transactions with your business, you’ll need extra help answering those questions, and Verifi’s pre-dispute solutions can help.
Elevating the post-transaction experience
What makes a good post-transaction experience? In a word, communication. If you think about all the options customers have to make purchases, both e-commerce and physical locations, with family members sometimes sharing the same account or card, then post-transaction communication is simply smart business. Many sellers may provide a basic transaction receipt, or a targeted follow-up marketing message, but an enhanced, detailed digital receipt can be the kind of customer service that distinguishes your business from your competitors. Here are a couple of ways digital receipts enhance the post-transaction experience:
- Uncover Family Fraud
- When a purchase is made by a family member without the cardholder’s knowledge, there is a higher likelihood that the purchase will be reported as fraudulent. By listing the device and email address used for the transaction, the cardholder can determine which family member made the purchase.
- Clarify Confusing Bank Statements
- Banking statements, both online and off, can have limited transaction information, often only including transaction date, post date, amount, and merchant descriptor. A detailed digital receipt can clarify a lot of customer confusion stemming from this lack of transaction information. Giving the customer more information about their transactions is not only good customer service but may help prevent disputes as well.
Digital receipts can also mitigate “friendly fraud” or “first-party fraud,” when the customer seeks a refund for a valid sale. This can happen for any number of reasons. Maybe the customer forgot they made the purchase, doesn’t recognize it on their statement, has buyer’s remorse, or is knowingly committing digital shoplifting. By listing the device and email used for the purchase, along with detailed business information, the customer will be able to validate the transaction or give digital shoplifting a serious second thought.
Ideally, a digital receipt – either delivered by email or through Verifi’s services – will help prevent a dispute altogether and save a customer relationship. Cost per acquisition can be pricey when considering all of the marketing, advertising, and PR costs that go into acquiring a new customer. It’s easier and less expensive to retain an existing one. So, a bump in operational costs or extra time spent creating a digital receipt is a wise investment.
Seller-initiated digital receipt best practices
Remember, when you create a digital receipt for your business, you’re representing your brand. Make it engaging, well-designed, and have it contain a marketing message. But don’t forget, the main purpose is to help validate the transaction for a cardholder who may not be the person who made the purchase. This scenario can happen when multiple accounts are tied to a single credit card. So, aside from including item, price, and date of purchase details, here are a few things to keep in mind.
- Direct and concise subject line – “Your purchase receipt for $25.20 from Tech Central.”
- Include device and email address used for the purchase
- Show how your descriptor information will appear on a bank statement
- Limit marketing content to 30% to ensure deliverability
- Alert customer if there is a delay in shipping (at any time)
- Include your contact details for further customer questions
- Send receipt email the same day as when the purchase was made
Stay connected to your customers through issuer collaboration
By providing your own digital receipt, you have performed due diligence in keeping your customer informed of a valid transaction, including the information to validate it. This is also good evidence should you require it for dispute representment. But what if your customer misfiles the email or, like 76% of people with a transaction inquiry, just calls their issuer?
This is where Verifi’s PREVENT solution comes into play. PREVENT is powered by Order Insight (formerly Visa Merchant Purchase Inquiry (VMPI)) and accessed by issuers on the Visa Resolve Online (VROL) platform. Order Insight enables you to share transaction details with issuers, allowing you to choose from over 160 fields to map data across. This data transfer happens in near real time, at the issuer’s request, while on the phone with your customer, empowering the issuer to help validate the transaction and prevent a dispute at the point of first customer inquiry. Order Insight essentially extends your customer service to issuer call centers, providing an improved customer experience and preventing disputes from entering the payments ecosystem. That’s some serious collaboration for a lot of wins.
Order Insight covers all major card brands, has global reach in over 200 countries and territories, and handles transactions in most currencies. Customer self-service is also available through Order Insight Digital, which delivers detailed business and transaction data to the issuer’s online banking and mobile app and is available 24/7. Order Insight keeps you involved in the customer service experience even when your customer reaches out to their issuer.
Differentiating your value with better customer service
With retail e-commerce sales estimated to have increased 44% year-over-year for the second quarter of 2020, it’s more important than ever to stand out among your competitors. An informative email digital receipt is a low investment, high reward way to do just that – an easy win for you and your customers. For extra help when customers question transactions, there’s Verifi’s PREVENT solution that keeps you in the customer service conversation by enabling collaboration with issuers.
Find out more about how you can elevate your customer experience and protect your payments with Verifi’s PREVENT pre-dispute solution. To chat with a Verifi representative, contact us today.
Reference
The Chargeback Triangle – Verifi
Quarterly Retail E-commerce Sales Second Quarter 2020 – US Census Bureau