For enterprise ecommerce businesses, fraud prevention isn’t an outside job. They likely have a team in place and probably believe they’ve cracked the code to fraud prevention. However, their team may not recognize fraud outside their industry or the team members’ experience. That’s when a fraud prevention partner can help.
“Enterprise ecommerce companies might have an in-house team that is pretty robust, but when they say they have fraud under control, they need to ensure they’re looking at it from all angles. They’re experiencing low fraud pressure, but it could be at the expense of revenue.” Rick Sunzeri, Director of Enterprise Accounts, ClearSale
Enterprise ecommerce fraud teams may bring experience to the table, but they may also fall into specific pitfalls, including:
Fraud prevention isn’t linear – it happens in cycles as fraudsters become better at working around traditional tactics. That’s why so much fraud is missed and so many legitimate transactions are rejected.
Additionally, fighting fraud isn’t just about managing chargebacks. Just because an enterprise business has a low chargeback rate doesn’t mean they have fraud under control. It simply means they have a low chargeback rate. Not only that, but enterprise businesses also tend to make significant sacrifices for the sake of low chargeback rates:
In this blog, we review the five ways to get the most value from a fraud prevention partner.
1. Leverage Industry Experience
2. Get Chargeback Mitigation Assistance
3. Reduce False Declines
4. Identify Knowledge Gaps
5. Augment Staff Strategically
Let’s start with experience – ecommerce fraud industry experience.
When working with an ecommerce fraud prevention solution provider, it’s important to find a partner that’s equally committed to success – not just with fraud prevention, but also with bottom-line success. At ClearSale, we see ourselves as a true partner to our clients and we’re focused on their profitability.
How do we do this? Customer service. Our client success teams are laser-focused on helping translate client needs to our internal teams.
We also bring the experience that comes from fighting fraud in regions of the world with the most criminal activity. Our fraud teams have seen nearly every scheme, and our artificial intelligence makes it possible for machine learning, where our system can determine the most appropriate cutoff points for automatic approvals based on each client’s unique customers combined with global fraud trends.
|
No matter how skilled an enterprise merchant's in-house team may be, they're only going to have knowledge about their fraud. |
Clients who work with ClearSale get the full support of customer support representatives, data analysts and fraud specialists. No matter the need, our team responds quickly with total transparency to identify issues and solve problems.
That includes handling chargebacks.
Even when a company’s chargeback rate is low, there’s still the need to respond to requests for data, mitigate disputes and even work toward reversals in the event that fraudsters or customers are refunded. Enterprise teams are busy enough identifying fraud, reviewing suspicious transactions and handling high transaction volumes. They don’t necessarily have the time to also manage the chargeback process. Delegating that work to a fraud prevention partner can add value and alleviate internal teams from having to follow up on chargebacks.
At ClearSale, our client success team works through the chargeback mitigation process with the goal of reducing the client’s chargeback rate even lower and win as many disputes as possible.
David Fletcher, Senior Vice President, ClearSale
In-house teams have a bad habit of setting up strict policies, business rules and filters that create more problems than they solve. In the interest of reducing as much fraud as possible, this rigid approach to automated fraud prevention usually reduces the company’s transaction approval rate and increases the number of declined transactions that are actually valid.
In our original research, State of Consumer Attitudes on Ecommerce, Fraud & CX 2021, we discovered just how bad the consequences are for companies when they mistake valid customers for fraudsters:
To strike a balance between detecting and declining fraud, enterprise businesses have to walk a fine line and provide exceptional customer experience (CX) and user experience (UX) while optimizing revenue. It can be a difficult undertaking without help.
When ClearSale works with clients, we run an auditing program that compares the results from a control group of previously processed purchases with a random set of transactions to determine if the right choice was made. The audit validates how accurate existing automated rules are and pinpoints which adjustments are needed to improve accuracy.
That’s not all ClearSale does. Our client success team usually works with clients to find out what data is missing to determine the types of transactions that should be approved and declined. Using that data, we further adjust the artificial intelligence in our system to make sure only the truly fraudulent transactions are declined moving forward.
Enterprise ecommerce businesses don’t always know the answers to questions. That’s when they can get value from learning what they don’t know but would benefit from knowing.
The fast pace of fighting fraud can make it difficult to be retrospective and see trends over time. Sometimes, it’s all an in-house team can do to stay on top of identifying fraud. There’s tremendous value in understanding fraud trends to improve automatic approvals and conduct more effective secondary reviews.
At ClearSale, our client success teams conduct quarterly business reviews that include data analysts who offer insight into the information they see and answer questions the client may have. Our data analysts identify issues and missing data, while our fraud analysis team helps interpret results, provide opinions and offer feedback. As a result, our clients’ in-house teams gain more expertise.
Rafael Lourenco, Executive Vice President & Partner, ClearSale
Lastly, enterprise ecommerce businesses can add value by augmenting their in-house teams as needed.
Enterprise fraud teams know their business well, so it doesn’t make sense to replace them in the name of fighting fraud. However, it does make sense to augment in-house teams with resources during peak transaction times and when staffing levels are low. Augmentation has several benefits: It can offer insight and training, it’s a way for companies to leverage an analytics team they don’t have, and it can help upskill internal fraud prevention teams.
At ClearSale, our fraud prevention resources stay abreast of trends so in-house teams can focus on operations other than fraud. For example, if a large-value transaction comes through and our client needs support, ClearSale’s team conducts reviews, makes phone calls and puts the fraud puzzle together to determine if it’s a valid transaction.
Our team then provides an explanation of the actions taken and walks the in-house team through actions performed to verify the transaction, including phone calls with the customer, machine learning and secondary review.
At ClearSale, our experienced fraud analysts can augment any team, increase your staff’s existing knowledge and keep your organization updated on the latest fraud trends. We can integrate our fraud solution at any point in the customer journey. As a result, we help enterprise ecommerce businesses recover lost revenue and reduce false declines while improving their fraud prevention strategy.
To learn more about how ClearSale has helped other enterprise companies fight fraud and maximize revenue, our team is available.