Retailers are always looking for ways to deliver safe, frictionless experiences to engage and satisfy customers. But for every retailer committed to providing a top-notch customer journey, there’s at least one bad actor out to capitalize on a customer’s misfortune. Many retailers look only at transaction fraud, and not the total impact of every digital consumer interaction.
From signup to login to account changes and reviews, retailers face waves of opportunities to create a digital relationship with a customer. All the while the abuse economy is stepping up its game with tactics such as engaging services that enable anyone to hire a bot army for contacting consumers, impersonating accounts, retrieving one-time passwords and completing fraudulent transactions.
Entire Facebook groups are devoted to buying customer reviews. Organized bad actors may even buy negative reviews for competitors instead of pursuing positive reviews for themselves because, unfortunately, they think it’s easier than building a legitimately good reputation.
Each step in the online customer journey is another opportunity to build a trusted relationship with customers, but retailers fearful of fakes and bad actors create online experiences that alienate customers by treating every online interaction as potential saboteurs to their business.
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So how do we keep from alienating good customers while still filtering out bad actors taking aim from every angle — including false reviews, fake accounts and more?
It’s about switching the focus to online trust. When merchants stop obsessing over the perpetual cat-and-mouse game with bad actors and instead start looking for trust, they open up a whole new world of potential value. Organizations that can successfully assess identity trust in online interactions will improve the customer experience, enhance their brand reputation, build customer loyalty and extend customer lifetime value.
Digital Trust and Safety
Implementing a digital trust and safety strategy ensures you are delivering safe and seamless online experiences to individuals with trusted identities while also proactively stopping abuse and fraud.
This is a fairly new concept. In February 2021, the Digital Trust & Safety Partnership was formed by a group of companies including Apple, Google, LinkedIn, Meta, Reddit, Shopify, Twitter and others. The group is focused on identifying best practices and considerations, including how digital products are built, managed and promoted, and how they make consumers think, feel and act.
Digital trust and safety strategies should consider the following:
- Cybersecurity: Protecting consumers and their devices from malicious, anomalous, compromised or non-compliant code that enables distribution of the huge range of cyber threats.
- Data privacy: Protecting users and their activities from being tracked without knowledge or consent.
- Trusted content: Ensuring that the substance of an online experience doesn’t harm the consumer through false claims, misinformation or scams.
- Objectionable content: Threats, graphic and vulgar content and conduct.
Trust is a Two-way Street
Trusted identity lies at the heart of many of the issues that retailers face online and can lay a strong foundation for adopting new best practices as they emerge. Online businesses that can establish the trustworthiness of their users — at any point, across all points and over time — can protect their platforms from bad actors while eliminating friction in the customer experience.
With trusted identities, organizations can keep consumers happy with safe, easy online experiences. At the same time, organizations can gain control to stop hacked accounts, fake reviews, promo abuse and other kinds of abusive or criminal attacks.
Imagine if instead of relying on a reactive fraud-prevention strategy that only takes effect once a customer has completed a transaction, your organization could proactively establish a consumer as a trustworthy identity at the very beginning of their journey. When trust is established, transactions that might have raised suspicion — new customer account creation, changes to billing details, delivering to a new address — can be seamlessly approved instead of being sent to time-consuming manual review. The customer is delighted with their experience instead of being frustrated by the additional friction and potentially taking their business elsewhere.
When compared to endlessly chasing cybercriminals and reacting to ever-changing fraud patterns, focusing on trust makes a lot of sense and its value couldn’t be more clear. Companies that can easily identify trusted individuals will significantly reduce the costs associated with looking for bad guys while potentially increasing revenue, sales and margin from initiatives aimed at making trustworthy customers happy.
Where to Begin
Having a trusted identity solution is as important as the identity data itself. Here are some considerations when evaluating identity solutions:
- Look for a solution that offers current, comprehensive trusted identity profiles that have been compiled from multiple global sources and billions of verified identity elements.
- A solution should assess trust continuously throughout the customer journey to quickly evaluate activity, including attributes associated with account opening, login, account changes, purchase and other customer touch points, to streamline risk assessments across the decision cycle.
- Seek out a partner that offers easy integration and implementation across your website and app and a simple scoring method that reduces the need to orchestrate decisioning across multiple vendors.
When implementing solutions to mitigate fraud, retailers must avoid creating friction for good consumers or they risk losing business. By focusing on quickly and efficiently establishing trust, retailers can keep good customers happy and defend against abuse at every point of the digital customer journey. The result? More good customers, an enhanced customer experience and improved ROI and productivity.
Eric Choi brings more than a decade of experience in global marketing strategy and thought leadership in technology and financial services to his role as Chief Marketing Officer at Pipl. Prior to joining Pipl, Choi was VP of Integrated Marketing, North America, for LexisNexis, where he oversaw marketing initiatives for LexisNexis Risk Solutions and VitalChek including Fraud & Identity, Financial Crime and Compliance, Payments, Credit Risk, Collections and General Investigations. He joined LexisNexis through the company’s acquisition of Emailage, a SaaS-based technology provider, where he served as SVP of Marketing. He previously held leadership positions in marketing at Experian, HireRight, 1105 Media and Prophyts. Choi earned a bachelor’s degree from the University of California Los Angeles and an MBA from University of Southern California.
