Verifi’s Order Insight Facilitates Merchant Communication With Customers

Chargeback solutions provider Verifi has been a major player in the field for over 11 years now, and it’s still finding ways to assist merchants in the payments space.

“We originally focused on building merchant tools to help them manage and control their risk,” said Matthew Katz, founder, chairman and CEO of Verifi. “We’ve designed as many tools as we possibly could to allow merchants to have more control, better visibility and understanding of their business. We’ve focused on continual innovation, new products, new technologies and new solutions in the payments space.”

Verifi has a proactive team of analysts and a real-time decision engine that works to anticipate potential chargeback risks prior to payment authorization. As the company grew, it branched out to work with domestic and international card issuers. “This gave us a very different perspective on how card issuers view chargebacks and fraud,” said Katz. “It’s allowed us to build other products and services that connect issuers to merchants directly to create a more balanced ecosystem.”

Verifi’s Cardholder Dispute Resolution Network (CDRN) connects banks and merchants, allowing merchants to act in real time to issue refunds, work with the bank to clear up equivocal transaction histories or initiate traditional chargeback procedures.

Now, Verifi’s most recent contribution to balancing the payments ecosystem, Order Insight, changes the way merchants, banks and customers can communicate.

Order Insight gives merchants the ability to provide additional data to better recognize, remember and understand what they have ordered. “It allows the merchants to proactively communicate information to cardholders, through the bank, to give the customer the best experience possible.”

With traditional online bank statements, merchants are limited to 23 characters to convey order information to customers, said Katz — though many banks use fewer. “Each bank can choose what they think is the most visually pleasing for their mobile or dot-com site. We see banks that truncate that space to 19 characters or 18 characters.”

He continued: “We use the analogy of a vanity license plate. We’ve all looked at someone’s plate. It’s a custom plate, it means something to the driver, but you can’t figure out what the heck they’re trying to say.”

With Order Insight, merchants can convey as much information back to the cardholder as they see fit. This allows customers to understand who the merchant is, what they bought and when they bought it — providing a much clearer picture of their purchase history.

This additional information is key to reducing cardholder confusion, increasing customer satisfaction and preventing the filing of false fraud cases. “It gives the cardholder a better experience, not just with the merchant but with their card issuer because the issuer is empowering them with additional information that, historically, has never been available.”

Katz has found that ample communication between merchants and customers is key, not just for a more jovial relationship but as an additional means to protect against fraud.

His advice for merchants: “Make sure that the purchase information is clearly displayed on the confirmation page. Send your customer a notification when the product ships. Follow up again when it’s delivered. Letting them know that the package was delivered means the customer has a higher likelihood of calling the merchant than they do the bank.”

As Verifi continues its work to improve the payments space, Katz said it will rely on merchants for points of innovation. “The one rule that I’ve instilled within our business is no ‘field of dreams.’ We don’t build a product because we think, if we build it, the industry will come to consume our products.”

“All of our products are designed and built with our merchants,” said Katz. “We’re constantly leveraging upon our merchants to be our guides for where we should be investing our resources to build more valuable tools, products and solutions that empower them.”