The most effective dispute strategy for your business is to reduce the number of disputes it receives in the first place.
If you do receive a dispute, the most effective way to proceed is to work directly with your customer to resolve the issue.
Every card network has some provision in its dispute system for the cardholder to retract a dispute after filing it. If you can settle the matter amicably with your customer and convince them to withdraw the dispute, that's the best way to win it.
A withdrawn dispute is one that your customer has asked their card issuer to cancel. It isn't necessarily a won dispute, as the dispute might still resolve as a loss if you haven't submitted evidence.
A withdrawn dispute is otherwise no different from any other dispute.
Cardholders can only withdraw disputes that are wholly financial in nature – in other words, a chargeback – and in cases where your account balance has been debited. They can't withdraw an early fraud warning or an inquiry, which don't have any financial impact. The cardholder might decline to escalate these but can't undo them.
While a dispute withdrawal is a good way to turn a dispute into a win and offers one way to resolve a negative experience for your customer, it also requires some effort to initiate and complete an interaction with your customer. It might not be the most cost-efficient approach for every dispute, and you'll have to weigh up the increased operational burden against the lift that it gives your dispute win rate.
For disputes with a high likelihood of winning, you might want to just submit evidence to contest it, without contacting your customer. For low-value disputes, you might just want to accept the dispute.
Contact your customer to better understand their complaint and try to solve the problem with them. If you're able to satisfy the customer, ask them to contact their card issuer and withdraw the dispute. The process for this varies depending on the issuer, but in general, the customer should use their normal support channels to get help from their issuer.
If your customer does agree to withdraw the dispute, consider asking them whether they would provide confirmation of the withdrawal, such as a withdrawal-confirmation email from their bank or a screenshot of their mobile banking statement showing that they were re-billed for the charge. This type of evidence isn't required for your response to the issuer, but it could be helpful if your customer is willing to do it.
If part of the resolution with your customer involves an agreement that you will issue a refund to them, be aware that it might be weeks or even months before you're able to issue one. Your customer withdrawing the dispute doesn't necessarily speed up their issuer's dispute timeline. You can't issue a refund on a disputed charge until your customer's card issuer returns a win on the dispute.
Regardless of what happens between you and your customer, you still need to submit evidence if you want to win the dispute.
Always provide evidence for every dispute that you hope to have resolved in your favour, even if your customer has told you that they're withdrawing the dispute. Many card issuers treat failure to submit evidence as an acceptance of liability on your part. This means that even if the customer did withdraw the dispute with their issuer, you can still lose the dispute if you don't submit evidence.
You can only submit evidence for a dispute once, so you want to wait long enough for your conversation with the customer to play out, but not so long that you miss the deadline. The card network rules don't allow you to submit evidence after the deadline has passed.
If you can't convince the customer to withdraw the dispute before the evidence deadline, that's fine. You should still file appropriate evidence to challenge the dispute reason.
In general, disputes that have been withdrawn are not resolved any faster than other kinds of dispute.
After your customer has withdrawn a dispute and you have submitted evidence, you should expect that the dispute will still follow the normal dispute timeline to come back with a win or loss from the network.
On every card network, it's technically possible for a cardholder to withdraw a dispute after the response deadline has passed, and even long after a dispute itself was lost. However, some card issuers within that network might not support the late withdrawal of a dispute in every case. As with any other dispute, the cardholder needs to contact their issuer to request a late withdrawal and find out whether or not they allow it. Bear in mind that late withdrawals often happen outside the networks' dispute systems. Unlike the normal dispute lifecycle, they aren't governed by any network rules or regulations. Consequently, when a customer withdraws an old, lost dispute, it's hard to set a realistic expectation for how soon you should expect to see it reflected in your account. It's possible that it could take the cardholder's issuer weeks or months to process this type of adjustment.