A global leader in computer peripherals was losing an estimated $500,000 per quarter to sophisticated fraud — and the same manual controls slowing down bad actors were also slowing down the 99% of customers with legitimate claims. TTEC, an 18-year partner of the company, built an AI-powered fraud-prevention stack that protects revenue without sacrificing customer experience (CX).

For consumer electronics brands, warranty and return-merchandise authorization (RMA) processes can be tricky: make them too loose and fraudsters exploit them; make them too tight and legitimate customers pay the price in friction and delays. It's a challenge facing every company that stands behind its products, and it's getting harder as fraudsters deploy AI-generated fake documentation and fabricated identities.

The client partners with TTEC across CX support, technical and RMA support, and revenue generation in six geographies — Bulgaria, Mexico, the United States, Canada, the Philippines, and India. We've been the client's primary CX partner since 2008 and still carry roughly 65% of its global B2C headcount.

The problem

The core issue was something TTEC's solution team identified as "replay fraud." Essentially, the company had no automated way to detect the reuse of legitimate receipts across fabricated identities to claim repeat replacements. The threat landscape also included friendly fraud (disputing legitimate transactions), AI-generated fake documentation, and promotional and discount abuse. Detection relied entirely on tenured associates manually recognizing patterns.

Fraudulent claims cost the company an estimated $500,000 per quarter. But the bigger CX cost was that roughly 99% of legitimate customers went through the same manual scrutiny as the 1% of bad actors, slowing resolutions for everyone. A related process gap in out-of-warranty claim handling drove an 11-point NPS dip in one messaging segment in a single month, illustrating how warranty- and fraud-adjacent process gaps show up directly in customer sentiment.

The client wanted to reduce fraudulent reimbursement and payment claims, standardize receipt review globally across queues and partners, improve auditability and compliance, centralize intake and decisioning, automatically validate receipt authenticity across languages, and reduce fraud losses while maintaining or improving CX. Fraud controls that hurt the honest majority would be a false win.

TTEC was uniquely positioned to lead this work. The entire fraud-prevention initiative — survey, discovery, and the composed technology stack — originated from TTEC's account team, not a client request or RFP. The client shared internal financial exposure estimates and looped TTEC into direct collaboration with its own internal fraud and risk management team, a level of information sharing that goes well beyond a typical vendor relationship.

Client stakeholders even completed a TTEC-designed discovery survey so we could tailor our recommendations. This trust was earned over 18 years, including a Group Account Manager-led RMA process redesign roughly six to seven years ago that saved an estimated $5.2 million to $5.4 million in a single year.

Our solution

Two discoveries during our work reshaped the client's approach to warranties and RMAs.

First, a knowledge base audit, done in support of the fraud and AI workstream, found that the company's existing CRM Copilot was underperforming not because of the AI itself, but because the underlying knowledge base was poorly indexed. TTEC Learning Services team launched a knowledgebase re-indexing and enrichment that benefitted associate efficiency broadly — well beyond fraud handling. TTEC also flagged the need to govern the AI the company has, rather than simply adding more tools on top of it.

Second, a root-cause analysis of NPS detractors, which is a standing TTEC diagnostic practice, turned up cases where customers didn't need a full product replacement at all, just a low-cost accessory such as a mouse receiver. That small insight carried an outsized service and cost benefit, and it emerged from a diagnostic exercise, not a KPI dashboard.

Our proactive pattern extended further: a "white-glove" customer-connection training program rolled out at the end of 2023, and a 207-person internal TTEC survey that fed directly into the company's own. Throughout our partnership, the client has treated TTEC's frontline data as strategic input, not just a delivery metric.

Results

Our work has driven results for the company throughout the 18 years we've worked together.

The TTEC-led RMA process redesign saved more than $5.2 million in a single year, a precedent that established our pattern of proactive, quantifiable contributions.

We also identified and targeted $500,000 in quarterly fraud exposure through our discovery process and analysis, giving the company a clear baseline for measuring our fraud-prevention stack's impact.

TTEC diagnosed an 11-point NPS impact in the client's warranty-adjacent messaging segment, with root-cause analysis identifying both a process gap and an accessory-substitution opportunity that reduces unnecessary full-product replacements.

In addition, our knowledge base re-indexing improved the performance of the company's existing CRM Copilot investment, and a full fraud-prevention stack is being deployed to reduce the $500,000-per-quarter exposure while easing the manual scrutiny burden on legitimate customers.

As our partnership with the company deepens, we continue to explore ways to evolve its fraud-prevention tech stack.