Playbook, fintech app
The one handover in this set where a contact form is the wrong mechanism
Every other handover in this family ends in a form, and this one must not. Somebody watching payments they did not authorise appear on their account needs a telephone number in the first reply, immediately, before any explanation of what the assistant can and cannot do. It is the fastest escalation on the entire site, and the way you guarantee it is to put the number into the refusal wording rather than trusting it to be selected.
Why this is not the general answer
The handling pattern for asking for a person holds across every trade. What follows is the part that does not.
- The correct output is a telephone number rather than a form, which inverts the usual handover mechanic completely.
- How quickly a customer notifies the firm can affect liability for an unauthorised transaction in many markets, so the delay a form introduces is not a neutral cost.
- The number belongs inside the refusal message itself, so that it appears without depending on the assistant choosing to include it.
- These messages arrive in the vocabulary of panic rather than the vocabulary of fraud, so the trigger has to be wide and should over trigger rather than under trigger.
How it arrives
- i think someone has used my card
- there are payments on my account i did not make
- i have lost my card, what do i do
- someone rang pretending to be you and i gave them a code
- my account has been hacked
- i have been scammed, can you stop the payment
What has to be indexed for this to work
| The fraud number, its hours, and what covers it out of hours | The single most important string in the entire corpus for this industry. It belongs in the refusal wording rather than only on a contact page, because the whole job here is producing it in the first reply. |
|---|---|
| How to freeze a card immediately | The exact path inside the app, in one line. It is the one action a customer can take in the seconds before the call connects, and it is frequently three taps that nobody can find under stress. |
| What to do first, as your fraud team would order it | Freeze, call, then gather. Written as a short ordered list by the people who handle these, not by a marketing team, and short enough to read while frightened. |
| The unauthorised transaction process in outline | What happens after a report, what the customer will be asked, and the published timescales. Useful afterwards, and never a substitute for the number in the first reply. |
The reply
Please call the fraud line now on the number shown above, and freeze your card in the app under Cards while you wait for the call to connect. I cannot see your account, stop a payment or block anything from here, so ringing is the fastest thing you can do and reporting quickly matters. If you gave anybody a code or a passcode, say so on the call, because that changes what they need to do next.
The number comes first and everything else follows it, which is the entire design of this cell. The freeze instruction gives the customer something to do in the gap before the call connects, which is both useful and calming. It states the limits in one clause rather than a paragraph, because a long explanation of what a widget cannot do is the wrong thing to put in front of somebody watching money disappear.
Where it stops
The trigger. Any message suggesting an unauthorised transaction, a lost or stolen card, a compromised account, or a scam, however loosely it is worded.
Please ring the fraud line straight away on the number above rather than waiting for a reply here, and freeze your card in the app in the meantime. I cannot see your account or stop anything, and speed matters with this one.
It stops answering before it guesses, says who will pick it up, and asks for the one thing that makes a reply possible. Nothing about it reads as a dead end.
Never say this here
Out of bounds
- Anything asking the customer to complete a form before the number has been given.
- That a payment has been stopped, a card blocked or an account frozen.
- Whether a disputed transaction will be refunded, or how likely that is.
- Any request for a card number, passcode or one time code inside the chat.
Questions
- Why not just collect the details like every other handover?
- Because the mechanism is the point. A form emails an address that somebody reads when they read it, and this customer is watching money leave now. The form is right for an ordinary enquiry and wrong for this, which is why the number goes into the refusal wording rather than into a follow up.
- How do we make sure the number always appears?
- Write it into the fallback wording itself. The message returned below the match threshold is yours word for word, so the number is present by construction rather than depending on whether the right page was retrieved.
- What if it is not really fraud?
- Then somebody rings a line that handles it in two minutes and is redirected. That is a far cheaper error than the other one, so the trigger should be wide enough to catch a message that only hints at it.
Keep reading
- Everything for a fintech appFees, limits and identity checks are safe ground. Balances, transactions and anything reading as a personal recommendation are not.
- Handling asking for a person in generalThe design question at the centre of a support assistant. Offer early, offer once, collect what a reply needs, promise a time you can keep.
- The file outlasts the account, and that is a duty rather than a choiceClosure does not end a retention duty. Why erasure here is partial by law rather than by preference, and why chat removes nothing.
- A procurement reviewer and a frightened individual, typing the same wordA corporate assessment and a nervous customer arrive in the same box. Neither is served by being answered as the other one.
- A barrier at verification is not an inconvenience, it is a closed accountA photo capture, a liveness step and no published alternative. On a money app an access barrier stops the account working at all.
Try it on your own material
Upload a document or point it at your site, paste one line of HTML, then ask it something only your business could answer.