Sports and music fans are spoilt for choice this summer. The European football championships and Wimbledon have just finished, but the Olympics is about to start and the US Tennis Open and golf’s Ryder Cup and the US PGA will keep the excitement going.
Music fans have Beyonce, Rihanna and Bruce Springsteen to choose from among many major touring acts. While venue operators look forward to what promises to be a lucrative season of events, they continue to find the issue of chargebacks once again threatening to dampen spirits quicker than a British summer weather forecast!
The issue is getting worse as Card Not Present (CNP) sales become more popular: a recent survey by ACI Worldwide found that in 2015, 1 in 86 sales were fraudulent, in 2014 it was 1 in 114. Our co-founder and CIO, Monica Eaton-Cardone was presenting at this week’s Ticket Summit in Las Vegas on anti-fraud strategies with David Leppek of Transaction services and Kathy Sullivan of TicketNetwork.
Venue operators and ticketing companies are unfortunately no less prone to the problem of chargebacks than retailers from any other sector.
Fans might not be able to make a gig or match and being too late to offload the tickets, they claim that they were not authorised purchases, issue a chargeback and get their money back.
The chargeback process is heavily weighted in favour of the cardholder. When a chargeback is initiated the bank will credit the cardholder’s account generally without question, sometimes within 24 hours.
Ticket vendors that want to fight a chargeback have a process that is time consuming to address. The cost and effort of recovering money where there is no guarantee they will succeed makes it seem less than worthwhile many times.
It is time to say, “No, this is not just a cost of doing business.”
Just one activity that can help resolve this chargeback issue is to improve customer service. Many cardholders are honest, but if they find ticket vendors are slow to respond, or that customer services are hard to contact or not ready to resolve an issue, they will start a chargeback as it is easy and they often know they will get satisfaction quickly.
Vendors can resolve this by training customer service staff to a high standard, making it easy to find their contact numbers, which they respond to quickly when called and also by customer services staff trying to find a solution to the problem of honest cardholders.
While we cannot do anything about the weather, we can fight chargebacks effectively. Follow this blog and Global Risk Technologies™ in the media for more insights into fighting back against chargeback fraud.
