The Yokohama release for Financial Services Operations includes new ways to leverage AI and streamline dispute resolution.
Increase AI-powered self-service
Virtual Agent topic: Report a Dispute – Powered by Now Assist
More and more contact center inquiries are related to disputed charges. It’s expensive to hire enough contact center staff to manage the increase in volume. Plus, it can be time-consuming for both the Customer Service Representative and the cardholder to cover all the relevant details of the case to pursue a resolution. However, simple chatbot solutions aren’t sophisticated enough to understand the nuances of a dispute case and will only frustrate customers more.
In Yokohama, we're introducing our AI-powered Virtual Agent - built to hand the complexity of dispute cases. In this release, we’ve built a “Report a Dispute” topic for our Virtual Agent for Financial Services Operations – meaning cardholders can engage in a short, conversational interaction with a Virtual Agent to report a dispute. The Virtual Agent is able to populate a complete disputes case to then be resolved.
Virtual Agent is built to ask questions like, “what transaction are you disputing?” and “what is the reason for the dispute?” and even rephrase questions back to the customer if anything is misunderstood. It populates the necessary questions to ask by navigating card network rules and issuer policies behind the scenes. Virtual Agent can ingest other necessary mediums like pulling in transaction data from core banking systems, and intaking customer files for more evidence (photos, emails, and more). Virtual Agent can determine ineligibility with network rules and deflect cases altogether. All in all, this is a tremendous time saver for both the cardholder and the contact center. |
Many banks and other issuer are new to deploying customer-facing AI. When evaluating many of the options on the market today, it can be unclear if the benefits truly out-weigh the risks. The difference with our Virtual Agent, exclusive to Financial Services Operations, is it’s specifically for banks, meaning we addressed banking-specific risks in development. Here are some examples of how we’ve built for compliance:
- Now Assist is grounded in pre-defined case intake requirements; it can’t converse with your customer about anything unrelated to the case at hand.
- You have complete visibility and control over the model.
- For proper auditability, a conversation log is stored on the case.
- Our Virtual Agent will collect the necessary consents from the customer to pursue the case.
Banks and other issuers can finally feel confident that there is an AI Agent solution built with their specific needs in mind. Now, there’s a faster, more efficient way to resolve disputes.
You can learn more about ServiceNow’s Virtual Agent Topics here.
Automate dispute resolutions
Dispute Playbook Enhancements
As part of our dispute management solution, ServiceNow offers pre-configured dispute playbooks to automate the resolution process from Intake to Closure. By leveraging these playbooks, your bank can accelerate time-to-market, plus take advantage of some best practices that we’ve researched around efficient dispute resolution. With this release, we’re thrilled to provide even more ways to automate and integrate with out-of-the-box capabilities.
Here are the Playbook Enhancements we’ve made in the Yokohama release.
1. New out-of-the-box activities for the Dispute Playbook - Chargeback Flow
With many entities trying to communicate during a disputes case – merchants, acquiring banks, card networks, etc – it can be difficult to keep up with every exchange and expedite cases through the chargeback process. Here are some new steps we provide for additional support:
- Pre-arbitration – allow the merchant and issuer one last opportunity to settle the dispute informally before a rigorous arbitration process.
- Arbitration – if no resolution is reached during pre-arbitration, a neutral third party will make a binding decision on the case.
- Arbitration appeal – if certain criteria is met, an arbitration ruling can be challenged and re-examined by a higher authority.
2. Manage Disputes at the Transaction Level
With ServiceNow, your bank can ensure the most efficient dispute resolution process for your cardholders. We've identified a common bottleneck where cases involving multiple transactions often become stuck in the resolution process. This is because issuers are constrained to processing the whole case at the speed of the slowest transaction. Let’s say one transaction is still waiting on a merchant response – should this put the entire case at risk of meeting SLAs? Definitely not.
With this release, we are applying dispute playbooks at the transaction level, instead of at the case level. This way, a transaction can progress independently through the resolution process, at its own rate. You can ultimately resolve transactions faster, provide provisional credits to customers sooner, and reduce the risk of missing SLA timeframes. All relevant transactions will be rolled up as “one case” for visibility into the case level.
3. Dispute Playbook enhancements – Visa Resolve Online (VROL) Integration
If you’re using Visa as your card network, we have even more pre-configured capabilities to help automate and consolidate systems for dispute resolution. Since our disputes management solution is co-developed with Visa, our customers benefit from a seamless resolution experience leveraging the power of Visa and ServiceNow in tandem.
Here’s what new:
- Check for duplicative chargebacks with Visa RTSI APIs
When every dispute case costs you real time and money to resolve, it’s critical to ensure that every case is worth pursuing. Often times, a customer disputes a case that was actually credited back to them by the merchant already, but when customers are transacting multiple times a day, a credit can be easy to miss. That’s why we worked with Visa to check for credits, reversals, and adjustments as one of the early steps in our case resolution process. Not only does this save agents valuable time, but also quickly provides clarity back to the customer.
- Embedded playbook integration with Visa Resole Online (VROL)
Resolve dispute cases faster with a frictionless exchange between ServiceNow and VROL. Eliminate switching systems to submit a fraud report, look up associated transactions, or update a case status in Visa. All fourteen Visa “subflows” are embedded into your processes in ServiceNow.
Communicate with merchants in real-time
New Ethoca Alerts Integration
The best-case scenario when dealing with fraudulent charges is that the issuer can simply reach the merchant in time to stop the charge. The issuer can avoid pursuing an expensive chargeback or write-off, the customer is happy that for the quick resolution, and the merchant is spared the risk of losing money on disputed merchandise. But getting in touch with merchants, in time to prevent the charge, is difficult.
With this new integration to Mastercard’s Ethoca Alerts, banks gain access to the Ethoca network – connecting you to thousands of the world’s largest merchants – right in your ServiceNow dispute resolution process. This means you can notify Ethoca as a first step after confirming a legitimate case of fraud and cancel orders with merchants. Your bank no longer needs to pursue those cancelled cases with chargebacks or writes – saving time and money. Plus, earn your customer’s trust as their advocate in swiftly stopping fraud in its tracks.
Stay up-to-date on Visa rules
Visa rules update for the April rules change
Reduce IT costs on maintaining Visa rules updates with built-in, bi-annual rules maintenance shipped from ServiceNow. Rules are embedded across your dispute processes for efficient resolution experiences.
