Are Manual Reviews Robbing You of Profits?

MINIMIZING
MANUAL REVIEWS
ARE MANUAL REVIEWS
ROBBING YOU OF PROFITS?
eBook

eBookMINIMIZING MANUAL REVIEWS
http://info.kount.com/request-a-demo
2
The “Average” Manual Review Process Causes Problems...................................................................................3
Lost Time / Slower Growth..................................................................................................................................4
Less Flexibility / Reduced Profits......................................................................................................................5
High Cost of “Average” Manual Review Process....................................................................................................6
Most Manual Reviews are Unnecessary...................................................................................................................7
Best Practices to Improve or Eliminate Manual Reviews.....................................................................................8
Better Screening / AI Plus Human Insight.......................................................................................................9
Efficiency Via Automation / Faster Answers ............................................................................................... 10
Consistent Results / Profitable Scalability................................................................................................... 11
Optimize or Eliminate Your “Review Zone” .......................................................................................................... 12
Kount Overcomes Problems Caused by Manual Reviews.................................................................................. 13
Are Your Profits Being Hurt By Manual Reviews?............................................................................................... 14
Manual reviews are often a last line of defense against fraud. But
is your review process costing you profits? This eBook identifies
ways to minimize (or even eliminate) manual reviews.

3
The “Average” Manual Review
Process Causes Problems
The inefficiencies/constraints associated with the typical
“average” manual review process creates a number of
issues. For online merchants—large, small, or somewhere in
between—these obstacles eat up valuable time, slow order
approvals, handcuff new initiatives, and exert a drag on profits.
Lost Time
1
Slower Growth
2
Less Flexibility
3
Reduced Profits
4

4
Lost Time
Company A is a small e-commerce storefront. One of the
partners in the business handles all the phone orders, customer
service calls, and manual reviews. Lately, she’s been working
nights and weekends. “It’s like whack-a-mole,” she complains.
“Phone orders and customer service calls take so much of my
time during the day that I fall behind on the manual reviews. They
are really time-consuming—with the back and forth of emails and
phone calls—but I can’t just let them drop.”
Slower Growth
Company B is a medium-sized online merchant that’s
growing fast. When they were smaller, manual reviews were a
hassle. But now that they’re trying to expand into new markets,
the burden of manual reviews is overwhelming. “We decided to be
more restrictive and turn down certain types of sales,” explains
their web master and fraud prevention manager. “Could we grow
faster? Sure. But in this economy, we’re hesitant to hire the extra
staff to manually review those additional orders.”

5
Less Flexibility
Company C is an online gaming site. Manual reviews are
just not feasible for certain features, like in-game “buy/try”
offers. “We could drive significantly higher sales with in-game
orders,” reports their Fraud Manager. “Unfortunately, in-game
transactions have much higher fraud rates, and it’s not realistic
to conduct manual reviews during game play. But when we apply
stricter automated rules to account for the higher fraud rates, we
end up declining too many orders. It’s a lose-lose situation.”
Reduced Profits
Company D is a large online retailer in a highly-competitive
market space. They process tens of thousands of transactions
every month. “Manual reviews are a huge expense for us, but we
have to do them,” says their VP of Fraud Prevention. “We can’t
decline those sales and let them go to competitors. I wish there
was a way to get review costs down and make our pricing more
competitive...and still maintain our margins.”

6
High Cost of “Average”
Manual Review Process
Manual reviews are time-consuming and costly, yet their
use is growing. According to a recent industry report, a record
number of merchants said they were manually reviewing CNP
orders in 2013:
• 8% more organizations conducting manual reviews
than in prior year
• 42% of orders manually reviewed by small organizations
(less than $5 million annual sales)
• 7% of orders manually reviewed by large organizations
(more than $100 million annual sales)
Review agents typically account for largest portion of fraud
prevention budget costs. Yet for all the additional money and
effort being spent, the percentage of rejected orders was down on
only slightly—2.3% in 2013 vs. 2.7% in 2012.
And for scenarios where manual reviews are not feasible—for
example, in-game purchases during online gaming sessions,
many merchants are simply forced to forego sales.
If your “cost-per-manual-review” does not decrease as sales
grow, that means every new order actually reduces profitability.
This is not a formula for long-term success.
72%
24%
75%
73%
81%
27%
25%
27%
% of merchants conducting
manual reviews
% of orders
manually reviewed
2008
2009
2010
2011
2010
2011
2010
2010
2011
2011
2012
2012
2013
2013

7
Most Manual Reviews
Are Unnecessary
Making good customers feel bad is bad for business. You
spend a lot of time and money attracting new customers. Why
treat them like second-class citizens and alienate them by
unnecessarily reviewing their orders?
• Delays caused by manual reviews can lead to cancelled orders
• Customers may take their business to competitors who are able
to approve orders more quickly than you can
Even with all the extra time and money spent on manual reviews,
the number of rejected orders remains essentially unchanged
year-to-year. Why? The reality is that most manually-reviewed
orders are approved:
• 75% of manually-reviewed orders are approved (average)
• 90% of manually-reviewed orders are ultimately approved by
half of all merchants
2% more orders
reviewed equals
over700 extra
manual reviews for
an “average” online
merchant processing
100 orders/day
(based on the percentage of orders that are
manually reviewed rising from 25% to 27%)
manual reviews
9,855
manual reviews
9,125
25% reviewed 27% reviewed

8
Best Practices to Improve
or Eliminate Manual Reviews
Improving your manual review process—or even eliminating it
for certain transaction types—does not have to be difficult or
costly. There are proven ways to help you turn a negative into a
positive, without increasing fraud risks.
Better Screening
1
AI + Human Insight
2
Efficiency via Automation
3
Faster Answers for Agents
4
Consistent Results Across Agents
5
Profitable Scalability
6

9
1. Better Screening 2. AI Plus Human Insight
The industry average for manual reviews is 27% of orders. But
solutions with best-in-class automated screening technologies,
like Kount Complete™, can reduce that number dramatically.
A number of Kount customers have reduced manual reviews
to below 5%, and in some cases, just 1-2% of orders. And
for scenarios where manual reviews are not feasible, other
Kount customers are able to successfully resolve 98%-99% of
transactions without human intervention.
As data pours in faster and faster, it become harder for humans
to detect patterns of fraud. Artificial Intelligence (AI) can process
data at speeds far beyond human capability, exploiting in real-
time the “network effect” of massive amounts of Big Data. Kount
uses Artificial Intelligence to find “the needles in the haystack”
so your human agents can focus their efforts on evaluating only
those orders that are worthy of their time.
Proxy
Piercer™
Geolocation
Cross-
Merchant
Linking
Aﬃliate
Fraud Signals
REAL-TIME
ANALYTICS
Multi-Layer
Device
Fingerprinting™
Persona™
Technology
Mobile Device
Signals
Dynamic
Monitoring
Transaction
Velocity
Shopping
Cart Data

10
3. Efficiency Via Automation 4. Faster Answers
Best-in-class-solutions automate “next steps” for evaluating
suspect transactions before sending them to agents. For Kount,
this involves polling 3rd party resources, checking in-house
negative/positive lists, auto-emailing/texting confirmation
messages to customers, etc. By automatically applying additional
screening processes before intervention by a human agent, the
cost of manual reviews are dramatically reduced.
When a transaction goes to an agent, best-in-class solutions like
Kount present all information on a single screen and integrate this
information with the entire system, so that agents can evaluate
all available variables in full context. In addition, Kount can
automatically prioritize the most important/urgent transactions
so that they are processed first by review agents (for example,
based on “time in queue”).

11
5. Consistent Results 6. Profitable Scalability
Your manual review system is only as strong as your most
inexperienced agent. That’s why best-in-class solutions such as
Kount employ rules-based review systems, putting every reviewer
on the same level as your best reviewer. In addition, Kount makes
it easy to route transactions for review to the most appropriate
agent, for example, Spanish-language orders to Spanish-
speaking agents.
By employing a fraud prevention solution like Kount that
reduces the number of manual reviews while also reducing the
time that agents spend on each review, you can grow without
getting dragged down by manual reviews. Bottom line? You can
confidently scale sales volume using Kount without worrying
about overhead getting out of control. In fact, you’ll see profit
margins increasing as your sales grow.

12
Optimize or Eliminate
Your “Review Zone”
Achieve precise control. The Kount Risk Score quantifies the
likelihood of an order being fraudulent. Because you can precisely
define which Kount Risk Scores automatically get approved or
declined, as well as the range of Risk Scores that require manual
reviews (Review Zone), you control exactly how many manual
reviews you’ll undertake. Using actual customer transaction data,
you can precisely adjust your Review Zone so that the revenue
generated by borderline orders consistently exceeds the costs to
manually review or decline those borderline orders. You can even
set rules to eliminate manual reviews entirely.
1 10 20 30 40 50 60 80 90 99
APPROVE DECLINEREVIEW
ZONE
Kount makes it easy to adjust how many orders should be
manually reviewed and still maintain profit margins
Order Volume
Kount Score

13
Kount Overcomes Problems
Caused by Manual Reviews
Capitalize on Kount’s best practices
to minimize/eliminate manual
reviews. Reduce the time and money
you spend on manual reviews, while
growing sales, reducing fraud losses,
and increasing profitability.
AFTER KOUNT
Systematic, rules-based process delivers
higher, uniform standards for all reviewers.
Automated reporting shows up-to-the-
minute performance of every agent.
All data organized on a single screen within
the primary fraud management system for
rapid, intuitive resolution.
5% of orders manually reviewed, with
the option to eliminate manual reviews
entirely for certain transaction types.
Resolution as fast as 30 seconds.
Highly-scalable system actually improves
profitability as sales volume increases.
BEFORE KOUNT
Quality of manual review dependent upon
skills and training of the individual agent.
Manual, ad hoc reporting makes it difficult to
identify problem areas or struggling agents.
Review information scattered across
disparate systems, requiring agents to
manually aggregate resources.
27% of orders manually reviewed
(industry average).
Minutes/hours to resolve manual reviews.
Labor-intensive process does not scale
efficiently, hurting profitability.More Time
Scalable Growth
Maximum Flexibility
Higher Profits

14
In just 30 minutes, we’ll show you how other merchants
have reduced and/or eliminated manual reviews, while
still reducing fraud rates as sales have grown.
About Kount
Merchants using Kount can accept more orders from more people
in more places than ever before. For each transaction, Kount’s
“decisioning” engine analyzes hundreds of relevant variables
and activity across the globe in real-time, providing the most
accurate fraud prediction available. While reducing the risk of
fraudulent activity, Kount’s intuitive business intelligence tools
help merchants increase revenue opportunities in the future, thus
boosting sales while reducing fraud. Kount is a single, turnkey
fraud solution that is easy-to-implement and easy-to-use.
Are Your Profits Being Hurt
By Manual Reviews?
SCHEDULE A LIVE DEMO
Adam Schwartz
General Manager, BustedTees
“Kount provides so much more data that
90% of the time, a manual review takes
just 30 seconds.”
Kount provides so much more data that
90% of the time, a manual review takes
just 30 seconds.”
AWARD-WINNING RESULTS

Are Manual Reviews Robbing You of Profits?

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Are Manual Reviews Robbing You of Profits?