Fostering Collaboration Between Customer Support and Payments Teams

Cross-team collaboration is now a strategic necessity. Consumers have come to expect a seamless sales experience—organizations can only provide that level of service if all departments are aligned. In today’s hyper-competitive marketplace, a smooth sales journey is a deciding purchase factor for consumers. If you hope to earn a market advantage, you need to invest in team integration.

Still, many companies have not combined customer service and payments teams. Which is a surprise, as other departments, such as sales and marketing, have long since joined forces to good effect. Sales and marketing share the same data and customer language, so combined efforts help reps better target new leads, enhance promotional material, and prevent mistakes where different employees work on the same task twice. Similarly, service and payment teams share the same customer experience goals, yet remain siloed. How is that?

Let’s explore the benefits of cross-team operations and how you can foster collaboration between the customer support and payments teams.

Why are customer support and payments teams kept separate?

Business owners typically split customer service and payments teams into distinct departments for the following reasons:

• Separate functions: Customer service and payments teams focus on specialized tasks. Support reps have customer-facing roles resolving discrepancies, while payment teams work behind the scenes trying to optimize transaction processes and billing details.
• Varied skill sets: Since each team focuses on different business aspects, they require unique skills. Service and support employees rely on interpersonal skills, while payments teams focus on business goals and risk management.
• Security concerns: The traditional approach splits teams partly for security reasons. Restricted access helps protect assets.
• Unique technologies: Each team uses different tools and software. Customer service operates relationship management suites, while payments work with processing solutions. Rarely do these tools offer transferable skills from one another due to the nuance of their purpose.

A future with integrated customer service and payments teams

The old barriers to collaboration are changing. Modern aspects and expectations towards the customer experience are helping to break down the traditional payment and service silos:

• Seamless ecosystems: technology solutions integrate together to make a holistic sales process. In such a system, service reps can embed right into the checkout process and address payment-related inquiries.
• Data collection: Allowing for rapid data collection and finding insights on consumer behavior provides overlap with multiple departments. Service reps can now easily view transaction info compiled by payments to better address customer inquiries, further connecting both teams.
• AI and automation: eCommerce employs smart tools that combine service and payment team tasks. For example, virtual assistants can now handle routine customer inquiries about payment information.
• Expanded touchpoints: eCommerce solutions facilitate increased consumer interactions, which further ties payments and customer service teams together. Customer service reps can have access to between 20 and 500 unique consumer touch points within a single payment process.
• Monitoring: Digital payments allow for a top-down, inclusive view of the entire payment process. Real-time payments, alerts, and reporting enhance operations, which in turn supports service delivery. Such visibility promotes aligned efforts, as team members can visualize relevant information better understand the unique contexts, problems, or similarities found between two different departments. Shared understanding drives collaboration.

The connected solutions of eCommerce helped realign payment and customer service teams. Both departments now have common goals, such as accurate payment processing, high levels of customer satisfaction, seamless operations, and cross-team data analysis. Today, you have the tools to support those integrated goals—the opportunity for collaboration is available.

The benefits of cross-collaboration

Investing in cross-team collaboration provides you with several advantages:

• Increased revenue due to seamless sales journeys: Cross-unit support efforts on payment-related inquiries create a trouble-free sales experience. That strengthens customer loyalty, increases retention, and drives positive word-of-mouth referrals. Reports show that good customer experiences can improve revenue by 10-15%. Collaboration is just good business.
• Lowered costs due to data-based optimization: Inter-team cooperation makes employees far more efficient. For example, payment and customer service teams can use shared data to discover cost-saving measures, or to better understand customer needs. Together, they eliminate duplicate efforts, reduce errors, and limit manual handoffs. A study by Stanford University found that individuals are 50% more effective when working in collaborative settings.
• Improved payment processes due to enhanced fraud prevention: Cross-team efforts also improve fraud defenses (an area often siloed in a separate department as well). For example, support agents can discover problem areas from customer feedback, which payment teams can then address. And when payment teams fix those security risks, the overall workload for service reps decreases. Together, teams mitigate fraud risk.

More importantly, such combined efforts also protect the customer experience. Fraud attacks create immense friction. Reports show that even for a beloved company or product, 59% of consumers will walk away after several bad experiences. Limiting fraud through cross-team collaboration is necessary if you want to build consumer trust.

• Market agility due to proactive service: Collaboration creates a flexible organization that can better respond to market and customer demands. For example, if a customer has a problem with billing, a combined team can quickly identify and resolve the issue. As another example, service reps can proactively inform customers about maintenance schedules or store disruptions if they receive early notice from payments.

Customers want such service efforts. About 70% of global respondents stated they have a more favorable view of a brand after they receive proactive services. You only achieve that level of service agility through cross-team integration.

• Enhanced innovation: Collaboration creates an office culture of continuous improvement. Diverse perspectives, skill sets, and expertise are crucial for informed decision-making and strategic brainstorming. Moreover, combined teams establish feedback loops that share best practices, test ideas, and pilot new technologies. Contactless payments, real-time money transfers, and embedded pay buttons are all tools developed from cross-team efforts between tech providers, payment platforms, and issuers. Such tools were borne out of the needs and demands described by payment and customer service teams.

Efforts toward such digital transformation reap numerous benefits for your organization. McKinsey reports that a shift to innovative customer-focused IT operations can create a 20-30% increase in customer satisfaction. That is in addition to a 10-20% jump in employee happiness and economic gains ranging from 20-50%.

Chargeback reduction and dispute resolution

Since payments and service teams focus on the customer experience, both teams have a direct impact on chargeback volume. How they operate determines the potential revenue losses due to disputes. And previously, fighting chargebacks became a job for just customer service reps. As volume increased, reps couldn’t handle the workload, to the point where they did not even attempt to win false claims. All the while, payments teams never addressed the root causes for potential disputes found within the payment process.

Luckily, investing in cross-team collaboration can help you address the issue of chargebacks and transaction disputes.

• Combined fraud strategies: First, payments and service teams can use cross-department fraud defense tactics such as fraud alert systems, detection analysis tools, shared case investigations, and verification protocols. These efforts limit chargebacks due to true fraud (true fraud refers to the use of stolen credit card info by a criminal third party). As an example, fraud screening tools integrated by payment teams can result in fraud alerts that service reps are able to act upon. Together, both teams flag fraudulent transactions before they turn into future chargeback disputes.
• Combined payment flows: Second, collaboration can improve checkout flows. That helps limit chargebacks due to user confusion, forgetfulness, and buyer’s remorse. In addition, recent data shows that the average cart abandonment rate is 70%, with around 28% of consumers citing a checkout process that is too long or complicated as the reason for such abandonment. It pays to improve your sales journey and limit chargebacks due to procedural errors (which contribute to 20-40% of chargeback volume).

Cross-team efforts could include creating clear billing descriptors, transparent product info, user-friendly pay interfaces, and post-purchase communication. Users can then recognize charges, find receipts, and contact customer service for any issues. Without such efforts, a customer might opt for the convenience of a chargeback instead.

• Combined dispute resolution: Third, both payment and service teams are needed to optimize the chargeback process. A higher dispute win rate recovers lost revenue, a crucial aspect for the health of any business. But recent data shows that almost two-thirds of surveyed merchants rarely dispute a chargeback, if at all. When asked the reason why, the highest percentage cited not winning enough representments to justify the cost. Collaboration offers a solution to that problem, as cross-team efforts lower costs while improving win rates. For example, departments that share data can compile high-quality evidence at a fraction of the expense. The result is improved issue resolution.
• Combined service efforts: Fourth, collaboration boosts service quality. For example, integrated payment and service teams are better equipped to ensure prompt order fulfillment. And trained support reps might handle payment-related inquiries all while maintaining continuous consumer contact. Such efforts have a direct impact on chargebacks related to delivery problems, product issues, or communication issues. Moreover, recent data shows that 77% of customers who had a positive payment journey are willing to forgive a bad experience, and that included disputes. With the help of payments, service teams can deflect what would have been a chargeback if both teams operated in silos.

A checklist for building cross-team collaboration

Use the following steps to help foster cross-team collaboration in your own organization:

• Build cross-department communication channels: Use conferencing tools and project management software to create inter-department contact.
• Invest in data sharing: Use data, relationship, and middleware tools to make all collected data insight accessible to all departments.
• Implement common objectives: Provide shared goals, propped up by cross-team performance metrics. A common vision makes departments more likely to work together.
• Reward those who exemplify business values: Offer incentives to employees who demonstrate the business values of teamwork and continuous learning.
• Assign cross-team projects: Place teams in situations that require collaboration (e.g. training modules that involve all departments).
• Schedule interdepartmental meetings: Invest in regular team meetings that convey strategic business goals in a collaborative manner.
• Utilize holistic technology tools: Foster collaborative with direct cross-team solutions such as enterprise resource planning, customer experience platforms, and business intelligence tools.
• Create an environment of feedback: Develop a work culture that accepts experimentation and is open to review. Inclusion and openness lead to opportunities for teamwork.

Invest in chargeback mitigation solutions: Mitigation solutions like Justt use integrated AI tools to facilitate greater coordination between payments and other departments such as service teams. Captured data about chargeback outcomes across multiple accounts offers enhanced visibility—both payment and service teams can use it to better mitigate risky transactions, improve dispute resolution, and invest in customer relationship management. In addition, analytics helps explain the many variables within business systems that result in chargebacks. That data can help coordinate departments as payments and service teams prioritize and address the root causes for chargebacks and chargeback losses.

Wrap up

Customer support teams and payments teams are closer related than you might think. And with the introduction of collaborative digital tools, your teams are more than ready to adopt cross-department operations. The result is a smooth payment process for your customers. Enabling both of these departments to work together improves customer satisfaction and helps limit revenue loss from chargebacks.

Read more about how to correctly unlock the power of business technology to boost efficiency and customer satisfaction.