A simple follow up procedure for declined purchases can salvage missed revenue.
There are many reasons why transactions may get declined.
Using reports in your ecommerce store, and having a customer service rep follow up with them you can save as much as 80% of your daily declined transactions if you follow up with them within 30 minutes to 1 hour.
To get all the details, check out the video!
I want to talk to you about transaction declines. So transaction declines are when someone tries to make a purchase on your store, and they think they have the money, and for whatever reason, the card gets declined — it doesn’t go through, whether it’s a AVS mismatch — who knows what. There’s all kinds of reasons that the card to get declined. However this all happens automated, so most of these customers… they’ll try one or two times, and then they get frustrated and they give up, and that’s the end of it.
So those transactions are declined — your other customers transactions are approved — and everything goes through like that. What a lot of people don’t realize, is that in your ecommerce store, there is a report that’s generated (in almost all platforms) and you can either activate it or deactivate it; and it will give you a feed of all the declines. A report that’s generated of all the declines that happen on a daily basis even as they happen.
Most people just ignore these. They don’t think anything of it. What we do, is we send all of those declines to accounts receivable (which is a fancy name for a customer service rep) who gets on the phone and calls them up and says, “Hey, I noticed you just had a problem trying to make your purchase while trying to buy (X Y & Z) and your card got declined… would you like me to help you get that to go through?”
A lot of the time it’s not that they don’t have the money, there was just some technical goof and they may not be the most internet savvy person. You can save up to 80% of your daily declines simply by having a customer service rep call them as quickly as possible after the decline happens, and just say “Hey, I noticed you made a transaction it didn’t go through would you like me to help you with that.” Not only are you helping increase the number of sales that you make, you’re also boosting the goodwill with your customer and building brand loyalty. Because now you’re showing them that we’re real and someone actually actually cares and they saw that I was having trouble. Without me even having to raise my hand, they called me.
So this is a very simple thing. We’re talking $8-10 an hour work. It’s not expensive work. This isn’t a highly trained salesperson. This could be your existing customer service rep. And what you do is you set your ecommerce platform, so that when a decline comes in… it makes a notification. It either like triggers an email or something like that goes over to your customer support person and it says “Hey, call this person.” You let them know that it’s the priority to call these declines as quickly as possible. You don’t want to wait any longer than thirty minutes to an hour if at all possible to call them. I like to call them within the first fifteen to twenty minutes.
The sooner you get it after the decline — the more “WOW” the customer is going to be, and the higher the likelihood that they still have their credit card in hand. They’re still wanting the product that they were going to purchase.
So it’s a very simple thing you can easily add into your business, and in our case we save up to 80% of our daily declines simply by getting on the phone with them. So that’s a big boost to our bottom line and then putting them through our sales funnel plus we can always an upsell them on the phone too. Check it out in your e-commerce carts and see how many declines you’re getting a day, and then give it a shot.