Chances are, if your business is growing, your chargeback problem is too. But are your people, processes, and platforms ready?
In Justt’s latest webinar, “Building Your Chargeback Management Team: Hiring, Structuring, & Scaling for Success,” Justt Co-founder and Chief Risk Officer Roenen Ben-Ami pulled back the curtain on what it really takes to operationalize chargeback management at scale, from the early “code red” chaos of manual workflows to high-leverage automation and intelligent dispute handling.
Whether you’re spinning up a chargeback team for the first time or considering how to evolve your existing setup, this session delivered playbook-level insights for leaders across fraud, support, and payments.
Why Every Business Eventually Needs a Chargeback Team
At a glance, chargebacks might seem like a small line item—say, 0.3% of revenue. But that’s the wrong lens. The real hit is to net income, not top-line sales.
In the webinar, Roenen walked through a real-world example: for an enterprise generating $681B in revenue with a 2.9% margin, 0.3% in chargebacks equals 10% of total net income lost, once all fees and costs have been accounted for.
Where Should the Chargeback Team Live? (It Depends.)
Roenen broke down the four most common departments chargeback teams report into, each with distinct tradeoffs:
| Team | Strengths | Blind Spots |
| Payments | Understands issuer/acquirer/PSP ecosystem | May prioritize throughput over dispute success |
| Fraud/Risk | Strong investigators, familiar with data and fraud signals | Often too narrowly focused on fraud reason codes |
| Finance | ROI-driven, understands fees and costs | May lack chargeback rule expertise |
| Customer Support | Close to customer pain points and comms | May deprioritize disputes or lack compliance awareness |
In practice, teams often move across departments as they scale, starting as a side project and maturing into a dedicated function.
Hiring for Precision and Scale
There is no college degree in chargeback management, so hiring is more about traits, not credentials. Roenen emphasized a rare but crucial combo to look for: discipline for repetition + appetite for nuance.
Must-Have Traits
- Detail orientation
- Curiosity and compliance-mindedness
- Willingness to follow structured SOPs
- Basic SQL or system fluency (depending on stack)
Ronen recommends working with university students in part-time roles to handle volume flexibly while preparing future full-timers.
Onboarding typically takes 4 weeks (2 training + 2 ramp), and the most scalable orgs introduce a layered management structure early—team leads, then managers—as volume grows.
Training for Excellence
Training is one of the most overlooked elements of successful chargeback ops. According to Ronen, here’s what your team needs to master:
- Your business model. Is the product digital or physical? What’s your fulfillment and refund policy? How does that affect reason codes?
- The payments ecosystem. Who are the issuers, acquirers, PSPs, and card networks involved? What are their roles and limitations?
- The chargeback lifecycle. Understand the stages from inquiry to arbitration, including how disputes are reviewed by issuers and how that affects your win probability.
- Tooling and evidence building. Whether your evidence lives in Salesforce, internal dashboards, or requires SQL queries, your team needs to access and structure it efficiently.
- QA and shadowing. Shadowing experienced team members and regular quality audits help embed best practices and accelerate ramp time.
Evidence should be crafted not just to tell your side of the story, but to make the issuer’s job easier. Assume the reviewer has three minutes and no context, and design every document accordingly.
Measuring the Right KPIs
Chargeback teams operate under dual pressures: speed and quality. The best teams measure both. Quantity is straightforward. How many cases are processed per agent, per shift? But quality is more nuanced. Win rate is the most common and obvious metric, but it’s overly simplified for the realities of the economics of chargeback disputes.
Instead, Justt recommends using Net Dollar Recovery as your North Star. This metric accounts for everything, from the variation in PSPs and fees to labor costs associated with disputing chargebacks. If that sounds complicated, we’ve made it easy with our free downloadable Net Dollar Recovery Guide.
Chargeback Analysis: An Untapped Opportunity
Teams are often so focused on resolution that they miss the broader trends in their chargeback data. Roenen emphasized that analysis isn’t optional; it’s the only way to reduce future dispute volume and improve ROI.
By analyzing trends across PSPs, issuers, and reason codes, and investing in the right data infrastructure, merchants can:
- Streamline evidence gathering by centralizing internal, PSP, and third-party data sources.
- Ensure evidence consistency and compliance with card scheme rules by enforcing structured templates.
- Eliminate avoidable delays by automating data pulls and minimizing manual bottlenecks.
- Improve win rates at scale by enriching each case with the most relevant, high-quality data available.
Without strong data and consistent analysis, even well-run dispute operations will struggle to improve over time.
Collaboration Multiplies Impact
Great chargeback teams act as connectors across departments, rather than working in isolation. Fraud teams need feedback when true fraud gets through. Support teams need context to avoid double-refunds or refunding abusive users. Finance teams must understand when recovered funds aren’t final. And product and engineering can help reduce dispute triggers in the user flow or automate evidence gathering via data integrations.
Ronen also emphasized the value of having at least one developer-minded individual on the chargeback team itself. Someone who can write a quick query, build a basic dashboard, or help streamline internal tooling often becomes a force multiplier, especially as case complexity and data dependencies grow.
Building a culture of collaboration, where frontline employees feel empowered to raise patterns, has a compounding effect over time.
Manual Processes Inevitably Hit a Wall
Most teams start manual, building processes that work on a small scale. But when business grows, chargebacks begin piling up, leading eventually to what Roenen described as “code red” days where his team couldn’t keep up with incoming cases. Their solution at the time was to shorten templates, a move that tanked win rates but preserved some coverage.
As the team matured, they ran into another challenge: template sprawl. Over time, they had created dozens (eventually hundreds) of templates to account for different reason codes, issuers, products, and PSPs. Any policy change or strategic insight meant revisiting all of them, updating language, and retraining the team. What started as a way to increase accuracy became a long-term maintenance burden.
Static templates and manual processes may help early on, but they don’t scale. Without a way to automate updates or tailor arguments dynamically, template-based systems eventually become a blocker to performance.
Automating Chargeback Disputes with Justt
Unlike template-based dispute strategies, Justt uses AI to generate dynamic arguments for every case, taking into account:
- PSP and issuer-specific data
- Merchant-specific rules
- Third-party enrichment sources
- Reason code logic tailored to card scheme policies
The result is more precise evidence, higher win rates, and better scalability. Because the system automatically and continuously runs A/B tests across data inputs and arguments, every improvement benefits all merchants on the platform. That’s the network effect in action.
Final Takeaways
- Hire for flexibility and discipline, not credentials.
- Invest in training that covers business, payments, and evidence logic.
- Measure both quantity and quality, and calibrate with random sampling.
- Don’t wait for chaos. Build a system that scales with your dispute volume.
- Look beyond win rates. Use your chargebacks to improve fraud, support, and refund ops.
- Automate smartly, not blindly, with dynamic dispute generation that improves over time.
Want to see how Justt helps teams scale from manual triage to intelligent automation?
Request a demo to learn how smart automation can drive better outcomes—without burning out your team.
FAQs
What’s the best department to house a chargeback team?
It varies. Many start within fraud, payments, or support, but as dispute volume grows, a dedicated team often delivers stronger focus and better results. Each placement has tradeoffs, so align based on expertise and strategic priorities.
How long does it take to train a chargeback analyst?
Plan for a four-week ramp: two weeks of structured training on your business model, payments flow, and dispute processes, followed by two weeks of supervised casework and QA feedback.
What KPIs should I use to evaluate my chargeback team?
Track both quantity (how many cases an agent can handle) and quality (win rate by reason code, PSP, and issuer). Consider focusing on Net Dollar Recovery. Complement these with periodic audits to ensure evidence aligns with best practices and policy updates.
Should I fight every chargeback?
That’s still the default recommendation, especially when using automation. But new fee structures (like Stripe’s representment fee or Visa’s acceptance fee) make it more important to assess ROI on a case-by-case basis. Dispute Optimization helps merchants automate those decisions while preserving win rate performance.
When should I consider automating chargeback disputes?
If your team is stretched thin, skipping cases, or struggling to keep up with rule changes and evidence updates, it’s time to explore smart automation. It enables scale, consistency, and ongoing optimization without manual lift.
