Restaurant Chain saves $1M+ in Credit Card Chargebacks with Automation

Challenge: Credit Card Chargeback Abuse

Credit card chargebacks are a cause of significant revenue leakage. In hospitality, chargeback abuse can look like gift card fraud, or customers seeking a “free lunch” by canceling charges after service is rendered.

Credit card companies give vendors very limited time frames to respond to these disputes. Limited accounting resources and diverse locations made keeping on top of merchant chargebacks difficult.

Monitoring internal threats was also a concern. Without proper oversight and auditing, employees were found to create faulty chargeback requests and approve them for personal gain.

A centralized plan to prevent revenue loss was needed.

Solution: Custom RPA Development

Working together with the organization’s Automation COE, WonderBotz developed a custom automation to fit the restaurant chain’s needs. The automation downloads chargeback reports from each merchant processor; BAMS, Amex, Discover. It applies business-managed rules to identify which restaurant chargebacks to dispute.

High-value chargebacks are sent to accounting for manual handling. Based on the chargeback reason code, the digital worker gathers supporting evidence for the accounting team such as images of signed slip.

For lower value disputes the process was fully handled by digital workers. The automation takes the collected evidence and logs into the merchant processor system to dispute the chargeback using the chargeback code.

If the disputed charge was for a gift card, the gift card is automatically voided in the gift card admin platform.

Once a result is returned by the payment processor the automation retrieves and reports on final resolution outcome.