When your tech can make the right call, CX can do the right thing
Fraud-related risks and their associated costs don’t stop at checkout. For your CX and CS teams, they’re just beginning. In fact, according to MRC, the biggest ecommerce fraud threat emerges after your goods have left the warehouse.
Refund abuse is a growing issue that impacts both customer experience and profitability, often falling squarely on your frontline agents. Who, unfortunately, are often not equipped with the necessary tools to take on this policy abuse.
Picture this scenario
A customer requests a refund for designer sneakers, possibly claiming they were never received or that they initiated a return but have not yet seen the refund. Before issuing a replacement or refund, the service agent has to manually review the account details at their disposal — checking past claims, total spend, and applying rigid criteria to determine if the request is routine or suspicious.
Meanwhile, the customer waits (often impatiently), alongside others in the queue with their own issues to address. Every second risks loyalty and favorability for your brand. The kicker? If the customer is a serial abuser, they already know the red flags your agents look for and have tailored their story to secure a refund.
Fraud or not, this situation takes a toll on your business, potentially costing the business more than the sneakers themselves.
Senior Manager for Order Management & Support, Comoto
If you’re on the phone listening to somebody ask you questions about why an order is canceled, you’re not answering a potential sales call… In one business unit of ours, we still get a tremendous amount of phone orders.
If the agent has incomplete information about the customer or overly rigid criteria for making a decision, risk mounts. The wrong decision could mean declining a request that should have been approved for a loyal customer. In practice, the agent’s role goes from creating a great customer experience to guesswork and damage control.
With a more automated process backed by better data intelligence, this scenario can look quite different.
A better CX reality through intel and automation
With an automated and behavior-based approach to assessing risk, the agent can instantly determine the appropriate action to take based on the precise risk level of each customer, minimizing delays for good customers and an abuser’s ability to game the system.
The response can be a gracious apology and offer to immediately refund or replace the sneakers. Or, if the claim is declined or deferred, it’s a straightforward conversation based on specific data at the agent’s fingertips, helping to prevent both losses and future abuse.
Rue Gilt Groupe puts the right data in the right hands
This is how the customer experience works at luxury resale brand Rue Gilt Groupe, where identity- and behavior-based automation enables customer service agents to make quick, informed decisions on refund requests, enhance interactions with loyal customers, and effectively identify and address fraudulent activity.
SVP, Customer Service, Rue Gilt Groupe
It’s a combination of putting the right tools in place and getting the right kind of data into the hands of your frontline agents to make the best decision as quickly as possible.
And the RGG is not alone in merging fraud control with superior CX.
A similar approach enabled an American apparel brand to halve the time it takes agents to respond to tickets. Another Riskified merchant cut its average claim response time from nine days to one, while boosting repurchases by customers filing refund claims by 132%.
No customer is a blank slate
Now imagine if our sneaker buyer is a new customer. Without historical data, businesses struggle to differentiate loyal shoppers from potential policy abusers, and an address or email is simply not enough to establish trust. The agent has little to go on.
Again, the answer is to put the right data intelligence to work. Network-based, identity-aware can immediately assess the risk of even a new customer based on behavioral signals and existing network-wide data. The system can utilize clustering data to predict a new buyer’s risk level, allowing the CX organization to tailor experiences even for brand-new customers. They can offer a quick resolution for low-risk identities, strategically apply friction (such as holding the refund until the package arrives and the return can be verified), or confidently deny claims from known bad actors.
This is important to keep in mind for the upcoming holiday season, when both legitimate and fraudulent returns soar and CX teams are overloaded. In fact, Riskified’s data shows that the share of orders coming from new customers increases dramatically during the end-of-year holidays by as much as 35% in sectors like fast fashion. The more customers have a great experience, the more likely they are to become repeat buyers, which means accurate first-time decision-making can have long-term profitability benefits.
Keep your policies, fix your data intelligence
When good customer orders are approved seamlessly and not mistaken for threats, it reduces emails, live chats, and phone calls for your CX teams. Negative interactions driven by unnecessary holdups are vastly reduced. Why is my order held? Why was my order canceled? What’s going on? Most of these issues can be eliminated, resolved upstream of the CX organization, or addressed in seconds by the agent.
Read our guide, Enhancing customer experience while combating refund fraud, for how to gain ground in both customer satisfaction and profitability with identity resolution technology that precisely evaluates risk, detects subtle manipulation, and prevents false positives.
