At Vantage we work with many types of businesses to set up recurring billing for services. This work includes implementing the proper payment technology for their specific needs as well as establishing merchant services on Interchange pricing plans and managing transaction qualifications with PayView data analytics. Yet our billing clients often find that one of the most valuable services Vantage provides is in helping them establish policies to prevent and win service fee billing disputes.

Dispute resolution starts with putting policies in place with clear communications designed to limit disputes from arising and when they do to handle them in proactive ways to prevent them from turning into chargebacks where cardholders escalate their dispute to their card issuer.

However, inevitably, odds are given sufficient transaction volume on normal industry statistics, merchants will be asked to respond to a cardholder chargeback.

In response, merchants will typically provide some form of a client billing agreement and a membership cancellation form to document their customer's agreement for recurring charges and their billing practices.

Here are a few suggested best practices to help merchants win more billing disputes:

• The merchant's terms and conditions must properly disclose terms. Not all disclosures are treated the same and the format of your disclosure is very important. The best practice is to list each individual term of your disclosure and have your customer specifically initial next to each. At minimum make sure to include your complete policy on a single page with signature of acceptance and if by electronic delivery your policy page cannot be a link to another page with additional terms and conditions customers must click to agree on the same page.
• Make sure your client billing agreement contract stays up to date. For example, if on file you have a signed agreement with the cardholder that says you are permitted to charge a Visa card ending 1234 and later the cardholder updates the card on file to Visa ending 4321, you should get a new membership disclosure agreement signed. This will prevent losing a dispute for the reason of not having signed disclosures with the cardholder authorizing billing on Visa ending 4321.
• On your membership cancellation form properly reference a "last billing date" and "membership expires on date" and have these initialed and signed. Do not allow the cardholder to use services after the membership expires date. Train your employees on your policies, the purpose of the disclosures, and to accurately enforce them.
• If you are using paper forms, note that Visa will begin to support e-signature or digitally signed documents for transactions processed on or after October 16, 2015. Always properly disclose to the cardholder your terms and conditions, have them initialed and signed in person and if not in person follow "click to accept" acknowledgements if you limit refund, exchanges, have an "all sales final" or in-store credit only policy and then retain a copy for your records.

Of course this isn't intended to be a comprehensive list but rather just a few of the best practices to consider. Please call or email us at [email protected] to schedule a consultation to talk about your specific challenges and get the expert advice you need to win more billing disputes.