Chargeback Prevention Team StructureCreating a Lean, Mean, Chargeback-Fighting Team
Building a Team That Can Scale to Help You Avoid Chargebacks at Every Stage of Growth
As your business grows, so will the complexity of chargeback management. That doesn’t necessarily require a proportional increase in headcount, though.
The most indispensable part of your chargeback management strategy is the people who make it work. We’re talking about the fraud investigators, chargeback analysts, and chargeback managers who help you predict, prevent, and challenge disputes.
These people work together seamlessly. If that doesn’t happen, your team will function at less than peak efficiency, and your overall profitability will take a hit as a result.
Besides being expensive and inefficient, throwing more bodies at the problem is likely to decrease your ROI. The best approach is to build a smart, agile team right from the start. So, let’s explore how you can structure a team that can handle today’s challenges while prepping for the future.
Defining Roles: Who Takes Responsibility
The smart move is to define roles for scalability when your team is first created. In practice, this begins with a clear ownership model.
Should the “chargeback owner” — the party accountable for minimizing chargebacks, lowering your chargeback ratio, and maximizing your fraud prevention ROI — be a single person? Your chargeback team? Your entire company?
The impact from chargebacks ripples across multiple departments, so it makes sense to have more than one stakeholder. At the same time, you can’t spread responsibility too broadly. Not having a designated coordinator will lead to chaos.
Tired of taking responsibility for chargebacks yourself?
Let us help. We can take the whole thing off your plate.
Request a Demo
Most organizations get the best results from a hybrid approach, where a single owner coordinates efforts across customer service, accounting, other operations. This makes it clear that chargeback prevention is a company-wide effort, and that everyone has a role in the prevention process. At the same time, you’ll rest easier knowing you have dedicated professionals in key positions to make sure things get done right.
Sharing & Recording Knowledge
Cross-function collaboration hinges on shared knowledge. This is where a robust knowledge management system comes in.
Your processes should be recorded in a central wiki or playbook. You need to make sure all the information is explicitly documented, preserved, and accessible to everyone across your organization.
Getting input from all stakeholders helps you identify the most accurate and useful processes, and pinpoint areas for improvement. Having a single “go-to” person ensures the information stays consistent and clear. Together, these two factors will create more effective management. The combination can also be used to help create scalable training programs for onboarding new hires or cross-training existing employees.
What Happens When You Need to Scale?
You’ve built a powerful team of professionals, but your business has grown to the point where they need help. It’s time to scale… but how?
Fortunately, the system you’ve set up to collect and distribute information will be a powerful resource. Your scaling strategy will look different depending on your current size:
Small Businesses
Say you’re a solopreneur, but you’re bringing on a small team to take your business to the next level. You likely only have a single person designated to handle chargebacks (it may even be you).That person would remain the chargeback owner, as well as overseer of any additions to the team.
Mid-Market Merchants
Merchants with the budget to support one or two in-house staff should already have a designated chargeback owner in place. That person would delegate responsibilities to new hires. Ideally, newbies would first be working with other departments to learn how your overall chargeback process works, then learn how to slot into that process.
Enterprises
A large-scale operation should already have a dedicated team (or teams) in place. However, scaling may make it necessary to leverage automation, or even bring in outside help, to handle additional volume and complexity, and to ensure ongoing compliance with industry rules and data regulations.
Most companies want to grow, but expansion isn’t always easy. Particularly when it comes to chargebacks, the best way to scale is to start with a tight-knit team with the flexibility to adapt to changing needs.
