BACKGROUND
The client, ‘Chargeback Gurus’ is a Certified e-Commerce Chargeback and Fraud Prevention Specialist. They utilize their industry experience to help online merchants save time, energy, and costs associated with chargebacks.
A ‘Chargeback’ occurs when a credit cardholder initiates a dispute with the credit card company. The credit card company gives the customer credit and charges the disputed amount back to the merchant. The charge to the merchant is called Chargeback.
Chargeback Gurus needed a technology partner that could help them build a chargeback dispute management solution. They wanted a software product that would automate the entire chargeback process thereby enhancing productivity and reducing manual efforts of analysts in their organization. The customer information required to facilitate chargeback analysis is gathered from the several third-party systems they already had tie up with. To be able to support the new solution so it could scale and evolve seamlessly over time, they needed assistance integrating the new application with those third-party systems and upgrading the company’s technology stack, which heavily relied on dated legacy systems.
Aside from the capabilities to develop a product, there was yet another attribute that Chargeback Gurus was looking for from their development partner. As their development team members at the time were working remotely from different geographical locations, they constantly had issues with communication and collaboration. Hence the customer wanted to build a dedicated offshore team that could take full ownership of product development.
After considering a few companies, the client chose our team as their technology partner because of our experience with similar product development and staff augmentation services for other clients in the financial domain.
Challenges
- ✓The client already made some progress with product development, but there was little to no documentation available for the work that the client’s in-house development team had already completed. So, there was no way of knowing which tasks were done and which ones were in progress. This made the migration to the new solution considerably more challenging as our team had to first map out what work actually needed to be done.
- ✓The customer did not follow a defined software development methodology or process, making it difficult to quantify the amount of work that needed to be done, provide cost/time estimates, plan future work or set expectations.
- ✓Chargeback Gurus’ team initially used JIRA as their management tool, but later transitioned to monday.com for some internal reasons. That made the migrated backlog tasks unclear, and also required considerable efforts to refine the backlog tasks.
SOLUTION
First and foremost, our team brought in two important changes to the client’s development ecosystem.
- 1.Our business consultants documented all existing features of the application and created wikis in Confluence.
- 2.Our project management team supported the client in putting up the entire product backlog on JIRA, and get the existing team to deliver rapidly using CI/CD (Continuous Integration/ Continuous Delivery) methodology.
We then created an automation workflow for the new application (namely ‘FPR360’) and supported the client in reducing product backlog by contributing to the development effort. Our solution architect worked with the product owner on the client side to clarify and finalize product requirements, and prioritize feature enhancements and bug fixes.
Aside from being the liaison between CTO and the development team, we provided extra hands on coding to get things done faster, and took over entire front-end development in Angular. Our team also managed client’s infrastructure, such as monitoring of server health, development environment and SSL certificate upgrades.
The following is the tech stack that we used for development of the solution.
Our team helped integration of the application with the following third party systems:
- ✓CRM Platform
- ✓Visa Merchant Purchase Inquiry (VMPI) - Enables Visa's merchants to respond to unrecognized card holder transactions and other potential disputes.
- ✓Keycloak (a JBoss community product) - an open source software product that allows single sign-on with Identity Management and Access Management aimed at modern applications and services.
- ✓Ethoca & Verifi - both portals provide real-time chargeback alerts that enable e-commerce companies to prevent fraud, recover lost revenue and prevent chargebacks
RESULTS
The solution we developed for Chargeback Gurus automated the chargeback process from start to finish and helped:
- ✓Identify bottlenecks in the chargeback process within their organization
- ✓Help the client onboard more customers into their business by improving the FPR360 product
- ✓Improve the project management lifecycle by contributing to process improvement activities
BENEFITS
- ✓Due to the automation efforts, Chargeback Gurus saves approximately $50K a year as a direct result of reduction in manual work.
- ✓The automation increased the number of escalations that analysts can handle by over 50%, thereby adding to the company’s bottom line.
- ✓Chargeback Gurus now has well defined communication, collaboration and product development methodology with a dedicated offshore development team working out of a single location.
