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Best
Practices for Disruptions
To minimize business disruption and consumer
dissatisfaction, CyberSource recommends that merchants consider
some or all of the best practices for handling outages.
CyberSource
recognizes that service disruptions can greatly impact your business,
and for that reason, we continue to invest in redundant, fault-tolerant
systems to minimize service disruptions. Unfortunately, despite
our efforts, CyberSource service disruptions do occasionally occur.
In addition, bank processors sometimes experience outages that are entirely
out of CyberSource's control. When these disruptions occur, they
can hamper your ability to complete sales in a timely fashion. To
capture these sales and ensure customer satisfaction, CyberSource
recommends that you consider implementing some or all of the following
best practices.
1. Accepting orders during
the outage period
Consider adding logic to your systems
to accept some or all orders during service disruptions. These transactions
can be marked as "pending" within your system and retained internally
until the disruption is over.
Once the outage period ends,
you can submit the pended transactions to CyberSource to receive
a credit card authorization. If the authorization is approved, your
processing flow can proceed as normal. If the authorization is declined,
contact impacted customers via e-mail or telephone to request another
form of payment.
2. Selectively fulfill orders
If
possible, you should delay shipping product until after systems
come back online and you are able to authorize your customer's credit
card. If this is not feasible for any reason, you can reduce your
risk of loss by requesting CyberSource to run an Internet Fraud Screen
score and/or a Delivery Address Verification look-up to help validate
the consumer's identity. You can also use the dollar amount of transactions
and the requested shipping priority as part of your criteria in
their fulfillment decision.
If you sell digital goods online
and don't have the luxury of delaying fulfillment until a later time,
you should also consider these techniques to minimize your risk
while providing a high quality customer experience.
3. Refer customers to your
customer service telephone center
If it is not possible
to accept orders and put them into pending status as described previously,
consider displaying your customer service telephone number on your eCommerce
web site.
CyberSource Professional Services is available for
consulting and/or implementation projects in this area. Please contact
your Account Manager for more information.
We hope that these
suggestions help you to successfully manage the problems associated
with any service disruption. If you have any questions regarding
these best practices, please don't hesitate to contact your Account
Manager or CyberSource Merchant Support.