All in a Day’s Work

 
 
 
 
 
Taylor Gifts, an online and catalog seller of household and gift items, found there is more to payments processing than just moving money around. When it hired Litle & Co. of Lowell, Mass., to handle its payments operations, it found a partner that could look at payments data, analyze it and help Taylor Gifts improve its operational efficiencies and increase its revenues.

“We look at all the data related to payments and are able to cut the cost of accepting card payments, reduce chargebacks and even use payments data to increase sales,” says Matt McDowell, director of Internet and multi-channel retail at Litle.

Prior to hiring Litle, Taylor Gifts used several other recognized card payments operations. “They did a good job in handling payments, but we did not get the attention to our customer support that we got with Litle,” says controller Guido LaVella.

A key change was in helping Taylor trim chargebacks from 5 percent of sales to just over 1 percent. “In the past, we had a lot of customers refuse the charge and say the transaction was fraudulent,” LaVella says. “We ended up taking a lot of unnecessary chargebacks on good sales. With Litle, we were able to reduce our bad debt. They took a look at our business practices and came up with a game plan.”

Some of the recommendations that Litle makes to retailers to reduce chargebacks are simple, like taking a critical look at how the retailer’s name appears on its website, catalog and billing files. Some retailers use a corporate name on billing records that is different from the brand name that shoppers know. Then, when a customer sees a charge on her credit card bill from an unfamiliar name, she may think she did not make the purchase. Litle advises retailers to make sure there is uniformity in the name.

“There is some general housekeeping that needs to be made at a lot of companies to make sure customers understand who they are dealing with,” McDowell says. “That can cut down on chargebacks.”

Litle helps train retailers’ customer service representatives to handle complaints and refund requests. Representatives who do not have the proper training often offer refunds to all dissatisfied customers; with the right training, however, they can turn a refund request into an exchange by talking to customers about the problem and directing them to a product that better suits their needs.