As in all businesses, there are some situations where a laundry customer may request a refund of their card payment.
Some of the most common reasons for refund requests include:
- "laundry machine was dirty and full of dog hair but I only noticed it after my payment to the machine"
- "I accidentally paid the wrong machine, can I have my money back"
- "the machine stopped working halfway through the cycle and threw up an error code"
- "the dryers did not heat up, my clothes did not dry"
In most cases, it is easy to assist the customer by providing them an instant credit in another machine using Tangerpay's convenient Remote Start feature to credit a machine remotely.
Another alternative is to provide the customer the customer a complimentary voucher code (machine credit) for use on their next visit to the laundry.
Yet another option is to provide a Refund back to their card and in some cases this may be the customer’s most preferred option, particularly if they have already left the laundry room or if they have already made another payment to start a different laundry machine.
In cases where providing a refund is necessary, it is possible for the laundry room help desk to use Tangerpay's Admin Portal to locate the customer’s payment and click the refund button to refund the payment back to the customer's card. Depending on the payment channel used by the customer (mobile/kiosk) and the customer's card issuer, the refund may take up to 2 business days to show in the customer's account.
For this reason, it is best to take a screenshot of the refund screen and provide it as evidence to customer, while also making them aware that it may take up to two business days to show in their account.
.1Laundry customer experiences a problem in the laundry room and looks around the room for the laundry help desk contact details. For best service outcomes, we recommend that laundry rooms have their help desk contact details prominently visible inside the laundry room for customer's to use. Laundry contact details are also displayed in the Tangerpay kiosk and in the mobile app but sometimes customers fail to notice.
.2Laundry customer contacts the laundry help desk for assistance.
.3Laundry help desk resolves the issue amicably with the laundry customer using the Remote Start feature, the voucher code feature, the Refund feature, or as mutually agreed with the laundry customer.
.4If the customer is unable to contact the laundry help desk or if they have already left the premises, sometimes they contact the Tangerpay support centre directly by phone or email. When this happens, Tangerpay will use a well defined process and workflow to process a customer's refund request:
.aAn online form is sent to the laundry customer so they can provide full details of their payment and the problem they faced.
.bAn acknowledgement of the refund request is sent to the laundry customer and they are provided a response time window of 5 business days for their refund request.
.cTangerpay internally verifies the payment details in the system and then emails the complete refund request to the laundry help desk.
.dLaundry help desk then has 3 business days to contact the customer and resolve the matter directly with them and to inform us of the outcome.
.eIf we do not hear back from the laundry help desk, the Tangerpay support team will automatically process a refund at day 4 and send a confirmation back to the laundry customer. We do this to avoid the matter escalating into a dispute with the customer’s card Issuer. Please refer to the Disputes and Chargebacks section below for more details on this process.
Tangerpay does not charge a service fee to handle a reasonable number of refund requests on behalf of laundry rooms.
A limit of 4 refunds per month per laundry room applies, after which a nominal service fee of $10 per refund request is charged by Tangerpay to cover our internal administration costs in the manual handling of refunds and to encourage laundry rooms to implement appropriate operational measures to better serve the laundry customers and reduce the frequency of refund requests at that location. To be clear, this service fee only applies to laundry rooms where the customer refund requests are not handled directly by the laundry help desk, resulting in escalations to Tangerpay exceeding 4 escalations per month per location.
Statistically, the overall volume of refund requests on the Tangerpay platform is very low (0.07%) compared to the payments industry average (5% to 15%), which means that most well run laundry rooms with customer friendly help desks will never experience this fee.
In rare circumstances, a customer will complain to their bank who will initiate a process called a chargeback. In a chargeback scenario, the bank will forcefully claw back the money from Tangerpay and return it to the customer and apply an additional chargeback fee of around $25 to $35 per disputed payment.
There are two typical chargeback reasons:
- "Not me" - A customer complains their card was used without their authorisation (e.g., card fraud), or
- "Not right" - A customer complains that they paid for a service but did not receive it to their satisfaction
Tangerpay will absorb "not me" chargeback fees so long as the number of chargebacks received from a store is reasonable (no more than three chargeback incidents any six-month period) and the value of each chargeback is under $15 each.
For example, a fraudulent customer pays $10 for a wash and then pays $10 for a dry. Later on, the cardholder sees these transactions and complains to their bank. The bank raises two chargebacks and claws back the full payment amount from Tangerpay, plus two chargeback fees of $35 each. So long as the store has not received other incidents in the past six months, Tangerpay will absorb the two chargeback fees from the bank and will absorb $15 of the total payment amount. Tangerpay will recover the remaining $5 from the store, and this will appear as an adjustment on your next daily summary report.
Upon receiving a "not me" chargeback, Tangerpay will immediately and permanently ban the card from conducting any further business across our network. We will inform the impacted store that a chargeback was received so that we may gather evidence to challenge the dispute.
If a store attracts numerous "not me" chargebacks, Tangerpay will apply additional fraud controls as needed to reduce risk of fraud occurring. Such controls may increase the card decline rate or may add additional steps to the payment process. We will inform affected store owners should this occur.
Tangerpay is unable to control or influence customer service at the laundromat and will pass on all "not right" chargebacks to the store owner.
Statistically, these chargebacks are rare and well-run laundry rooms with good customer service will never receive one.