What to Do When a Customer Files a Chargeback

You finish a job on a Tuesday. The customer signed the work order, paid by card, said thanks. Two weeks later you’re looking at your Stripe dashboard and there’s a notification: Payment dispute opened. The money is already gone. A $15 dispute fee on top, whether you fight it or not.

If you’ve never had this happen, you will. Friendly fraud — where the customer genuinely received the service and disputed the charge anyway — jumped from affecting 34% of merchants in 2023 to 79% in 2024. It is now the single biggest source of chargebacks in the United States. Trades businesses get hit harder than most because we operate in card-not-present territory by default (we’re standing on the customer’s porch, not behind a register), and because emergency calls produce buyer’s remorse the next morning when the customer sees how much they actually agreed to pay at 2 a.m.

This guide is the playbook. Not the generic version. The one for someone running a locksmith truck, an HVAC company, a plumbing crew, a garage door shop — anyone whose money walks out the door before the bank’s questions start.

First, understand what a chargeback actually is

A chargeback isn’t a refund request. A refund is when a customer calls you. A chargeback is when they skip you entirely and go straight to their bank. The bank doesn’t ask you first. They reverse the charge, pull the funds, send you a notification, and then let you defend yourself.

This system was built in 1974 by the Fair Credit Billing Act for a very specific reason: someone stole your card and bought a TV in Florida and you live in Idaho. That kind of dispute. The card networks have since extended it to cover a lot more situations, and the cardholder’s bank is the judge, jury, and tiebreaker. Stripe, Square, your processor — they’re just the messengers. They don’t decide the outcome.

That’s why this matters so much. The bank doesn’t know your business, hasn’t seen the job, and starts the process leaning toward their customer. Your job is to give them a reason to switch sides.

What just happened (the timeline)

When you get the notification, this is what has already taken place:

• The customer contacted their bank, not you.
• The bank flagged the transaction and applied a reason code — a short label like “Services Not Provided” or “Fraudulent — Card Absent.” The reason code is the most important detail in the whole notification.
• The bank pulled the disputed amount from your account, plus the dispute fee. With Stripe that’s typically $15 per dispute and it’s non-refundable, win or lose.
• The bank notified your processor, who notified you.

Now the clock starts. Depending on the card network, you have 7 to 21 days to submit your response. Visa is on the shorter end. After you submit, the issuer takes 60 to 75 days to decide. Total dispute lifecycle, start to final: two to three months. You can’t speed it up. You can only respond in time, or not.

The reason code tells you everything

Every chargeback has a reason code. Read it before you do anything else. The reason code tells you what the customer claimed, which determines what evidence you need to send back. Send the wrong evidence for the wrong reason code and you lose — even if you’re right.

For field service work, you’ll see most chargebacks fall into one of four buckets:

1. Fraudulent — Card Absent

The customer is saying they didn’t make the purchase. Maybe their card was stolen. Maybe they really don’t remember authorizing the job. Visa codes this as 10.4. This is the most common chargeback in card-not-present businesses, and it’s the one most likely to be friendly fraud (the customer remembers later but doesn’t want to admit it).

What wins this one: proof that the real cardholder authorized the work and was on-site. Address match (the billing address matches the service address). CVV match. Signed work order with the cardholder’s name and signature. Photos from on-site that show the customer or their property. Any text messages or calls between you and the cardholder before, during, or after the job.

If you took a face photo with the customer, or got their ID number on the work order — this is where it pays for itself. Locksmiths in California are required to record customer ID on work orders. Other trades should do it anyway.

2. Services Not Provided / Not as Described

The customer claims you didn’t do the work, or you didn’t do what you said you’d do. This is where good documentation wins or loses you the case.

What wins: before-and-after photos with timestamps. The signed work order. GPS data showing the technician was at the service address. Time on-site (a 5-minute job for a $400 charge will lose; a 90-minute job documented in your app will win). Tech notes that describe the work in plain language. Email or text confirmation of completion.

If the customer signed a digital authorization in your dispatch app and that authorization captured the date, time, and IP address — this dispute is winnable. If your tech just verbally confirmed and walked away — this dispute is very hard to win.

3. Credit Not Processed

The customer claims you agreed to refund them and didn’t. Even if you didn’t agree to a refund, the customer can file this and force you to prove it.

What wins: a clear cancellation or refund policy that the customer agreed to, plus any communication where you discussed the refund. If you partially refunded them already, show the refund record from your processor. Don’t send your entire terms of service. Send the specific clause that’s relevant, highlighted.

4. Duplicate / Incorrect Amount

The customer claims they were charged twice, or that the amount was wrong. This one is usually easy to win or easy to lose — the receipt and the processor log tell the story. If the customer was actually charged twice, refund the duplicate immediately and accept the dispute on the duplicate transaction. Fighting that one will burn your dispute ratio for no reason.

The five-minute first response

Within an hour of seeing the chargeback notification, do these things in order:

One. Read the reason code. Write it down.

Two. Pull the original job. Find the work order, the photos, the GPS log, the signature, any messages with the customer.

Three. Look up the customer’s phone number and call them. Politely. The script is something like: “Hi, this is [name] from [company]. I just got a notice that your bank reversed the payment for the work we did on [date]. Before this becomes an issue, I wanted to check with you — is there a problem I can help fix?”

You’d be surprised how often this works. The cardholder didn’t recognize the charge on their statement and disputed it on autopilot. Or a family member used their card and they didn’t know. Or they’re embarrassed because they remember now. If the customer agrees to drop the dispute, get it in writing — an email or text that says “I will be withdrawing my dispute with my bank.” Then submit your evidence anyway, with that written withdrawal attached. Always submit evidence even when the customer withdraws. If you don’t, the issuer might still side against you, and you’ll have lost without ever fighting back.

Four. If the customer won’t budge or you can’t reach them, decide whether to fight. Use this rule of thumb: if the disputed amount minus the $15 fee is bigger than 30 minutes of your time, fight it. If it’s a $40 job and the dispute fee is $15, you’re fighting for $25 of margin and burning an hour. Accept it and move on.

Building your evidence packet

This is the part most people get wrong. They submit everything — the entire job file, the full terms of service, screenshots of three different conversations, twelve photos. The reviewer at the issuing bank looks at thousands of these a day. If your packet looks like a haystack, they’ll find a needle against you faster than for you.

The right packet is small, organized, and labeled. Stripe’s own documentation says it plainly: keep your evidence factual, professional, and concise. Don’t overwhelm.

Here’s the structure I’d use for a typical field service chargeback:

Page one: A one-page summary. Plain text, no formatting tricks. Start with: “This dispute concerns service work completed by [Company] for [Customer Name] at [Service Address] on [Date]. The work was authorized by the cardholder, completed as described, and acknowledged at the time of service. Below is the evidence supporting this claim.” Then bullet-list the key facts in 8–10 lines. Treat the reviewer like a busy judge.

Page two: The signed work order. Customer name, signature, date, time, description of work, total amount.

Page three: Service confirmation. Photos with timestamps. GPS location of the technician. Time the tech arrived and left. If you have it: a face photo or video of the customer at the door agreeing to the work.

Page four: Communication record. Any text messages or emails confirming the appointment, the work, and any post-service contact. Redact long threads — only show the relevant parts. Highlight the most important lines.

Page five: Payment authorization. Screenshot of the payment confirmation. AVS match (address verification). CVV match. If the cardholder was on-site and you ran the card in person via a chip reader, note this prominently — card-present transactions are much harder for customers to dispute as “fraudulent.”

Stop there. Five pages, maybe six. Don’t add more.

Visa Compelling Evidence 3.0: why card-present matters

One of the most useful 2025 rule changes for field service businesses is Visa Compelling Evidence 3.0. If you can show the same cardholder has paid you successfully two or more times in the past 120–365 days — same IP address range, same device, same physical address — you can use this against a fraudulent-dispute claim and have a meaningfully higher win rate.

This rewards businesses that capture good customer data on every job. If your dispatch software just records “Service Call – $295” and doesn’t know the address, phone number, or repeat history, you can’t use CE 3.0. If it captures a real customer record with every job, you can.

For trades businesses, this is one of the biggest reasons to use a real field service platform instead of just running cards on a generic Stripe terminal. Repeat customer history is worth real money in disputes.

What to write in your dispute narrative

Most platforms (Stripe, Square, Authorize.net) give you a text box to explain your side. Most people either leave it blank or write a paragraph that reads like a defensive court filing. Both lose.

Write it like a one-page memo to a reasonable stranger. Calm tone. Concrete facts. Numbers and dates. No emotion.

Bad version:

The customer is lying. They were there when we did the work and they signed everything. This is fraud and we are not going to let them get away with it. We always do good work and our reviews prove it.

Good version:

On May 8, 2026 at 9:42 PM, [Customer] called our dispatch line requesting an emergency lockout service at [Address]. Technician [Name] arrived at 10:21 PM (GPS verified). The customer was present, presented photo ID matching the cardholder name on the credit card, and signed the work order acknowledging the $295 service charge before work began. Work was completed at 11:14 PM. The cardholder signed the completed work order and was emailed a copy of the receipt. AVS confirmed billing address match. CVV match confirmed. No customer complaint was received until the dispute was filed on May 17, 2026.

The second one wins. It’s specific, time-stamped, professional, and gives the reviewer concrete things to verify in your evidence.

What if you lose anyway?

You will sometimes. Even good cases lose. The win rate across all industries is around 45%, and for field service specifically it tends to run slightly lower because of the card-not-present nature of most jobs.

If you lose, the issuer’s decision is generally final. Visa and Mastercard both allow arbitration, but it’s expensive ($250–$500+ in non-refundable filing fees), takes months, and you have to win clearly. Don’t arbitrate a $200 dispute. Don’t arbitrate a $500 dispute either. Arbitration only makes sense for a few thousand dollars or more, and only if you have ironclad evidence that the issuer ignored.

For everything else, take the L, learn from it, and tighten up the part of your process that failed.

The real lesson: prevent the next one

The first chargeback you fight is the one where you learn what evidence you should have collected. The second chargeback you fight is the one where you find out whether you actually fixed it.

Here’s what changes for most trades businesses after their first dispute loss:

They start photographing every job. Before and after. With a timestamp. With the customer in frame when possible (one shot of the customer pointing at the work, smiling, dated photo — this kills 90% of friendly fraud cases instantly).

They get a real signed authorization. Not “Yeah go ahead.” A digital signature, captured in their app, with timestamp and the customer’s name typed underneath.

They stop running cards on a generic terminal and start running them through a dispatch platform. The reason: in-field card payments through a real field service app automatically capture the GPS location, time, customer record, and job context as part of every charge. When the dispute comes, all that data is already in the file. With a generic terminal, you’re reconstructing it from memory two weeks later.

They review their pricing communication. Most disputes that include “not as described” come from price shock. The customer agreed to a service call fee but didn’t understand they’d also be charged for parts, labor, after-hours premium, and trip fee. If you’re unsure your pricing is being communicated clearly, our pricing guide for locksmiths applies to most trades — the principles around quoting before working and getting written agreement are universal.

They issue clean invoices. A messy handwritten invoice doesn’t help your dispute case. A professional invoice with line items, the work address, and your business info does. Our free invoice generator produces dispute-friendly invoices in five minutes.

The systems that prevent disputes in the first place

Once you’ve been through a few disputes, you start to see the pattern. Disputes don’t come from random bad luck. They come from gaps in your process.

The job comes in by phone. The dispatcher takes the address and the problem and sends a tech. The tech shows up, fixes it, takes a card, leaves. Somewhere in that chain, here’s what didn’t happen:

• No price quote was confirmed in writing before work started.
• No service authorization was signed.
• No photos were taken.
• The receipt the customer got wasn’t descriptive (it just said “Service Call” with an amount).
• No follow-up text was sent thanking them for the business and asking for feedback.

Each of those gaps is a future chargeback waiting to happen. Closing those gaps is the work. A good field service platform closes most of them by default. A bad platform — or no platform — leaves them all open. Workflow automation isn’t about being fancy. It’s about ensuring every job creates the same paper trail, so when something goes sideways, you have what you need.

A few last things nobody tells you

The dispute fee is not refundable, even when you win. Stripe charges $15. Square is similar. Even if the bank rules in your favor and returns the disputed amount, the fee stays with the processor. Build it into your mental model. A chargeback that ends in a win is still a $15 loss.

You can’t issue a refund while a dispute is open. Once the customer files, the money is frozen. If you want to refund them as a goodwill gesture to make the dispute go away — you can’t. You can only ask them to withdraw the dispute through their bank, and then issue the refund through normal channels.

Your processor reports your dispute rate. If you stay above 1% for too long, you can be placed in Visa’s VAMP program or Mastercard’s Excessive Chargeback Merchant program. That means higher fees, mandatory monitoring, and eventually the possibility of losing your ability to accept cards at all. For most trades businesses, this means: don’t let unaddressed disputes pile up.

Stripe’s “Smart Disputes” feature can help. If you’re using Stripe and getting more than a couple disputes a month, turn it on. It uses Visa Compelling Evidence 3.0 to auto-build evidence packets for eligible disputes. It’s not magic and won’t win every dispute, but it improves your win rate without you doing manual work each time.

Three or four disputes in a row from the same neighborhood or business? Look at your pricing communication or your tech. Patterns aren’t coincidence. The most common cause we see in field service: emergency after-hours pricing wasn’t clearly communicated before the tech started, and the customer felt blindsided when they saw the invoice. Fix it at the dispatch layer, not at the dispute layer.

The honest math

The average field service business loses roughly 0.5% to 1.5% of card revenue to chargebacks, mostly friendly fraud. On a million dollars of card volume, that’s $5,000 to $15,000 a year. It’s not the largest line item, but it’s real, and it’s preventable.

The businesses that have this number under control aren’t the ones with the best lawyers. They’re the ones with the best paper trail. Every job has a record. Every payment has a context. Every dispute has a five-page packet ready to go in under fifteen minutes.

You can’t stop a customer from filing a dispute. You can stop them from winning it.

Get the next call ready.