The Coronavirus (COVID-19) climate has changed the retail landscape. Merchants that once had a store-first approach are in the middle of an accelerated process in which buyers are switching from purchasing both “essential” and “non-essential” products from physical stores to buying from e-commerce channels.
Tremendous spikes in online consumer traffic volumes seen across particular industries – including food & beverage, groceries & deliveries, and beauty & personal care – have underscored the need for businesses to digitally transform. Perhaps more importantly, businesses across the digital market have seen an unprecedented level of net new customers.
New accounts represent up to ~75% of all customer volume as compared to the 5% – 7% of new accounts that represented overall customer volume during pre-Coronavirus days.
This shift in consumer volumes to online channels represents not only new opportunities for fraud and changing fraud MOs, but also an important segment of many merchants’ portfolios. In order to capitalize on the possibility of establishing lifetime value of these customers, businesses’ fraud prevention requirements need to be well managed.
Here are the 2 things enterprises should know in order to better prepare their business and benefit from these shifting buying dynamics:
- Digital transformation is essential. By enhancing digital channels, retailers will be able to both capture new customers who may not have ever shopped online before, but also further cultivate the relationships they have with their loyal in-store customers.
- Ensuring the proper fraud prevention solution is in place. Managing fraud effectively will be a challenge for merchants with legacy fraud prevention systems in place. Influxes of new customers will prove difficult for rules-based or manual systems to vet, and will result in higher rates of false declines for these new users, despite the fact that they are legitimate customers.
As more new customers move from physical store locations to engage, to digital instead, managing fraud effectively will be especially important.
The Right Fraud Prevention Partner
Merchants looking to convert and nurture these new customers will need a more sophisticated fraud prevention solution that can proactively account for dynamic buyer behaviors and legitimate user activities, even if it is the first time they see a user on the system.
The right fraud prevention partner will:
- Understand and identify legitimate user behaviors. Unlike other fraud prevention systems that look only at past fraud or abuse cases, retailers require a solution that looks at legitimate consumer behaviors and interactions across a global network of data. This view across a global network of data allows enterprises to benefit from what trends and behaviors the system has learned elsewhere. This allows for a more accurate picture of legitimate consumer behaviors, beyond their site alone resulting in more approvals and less false rejections of good customers.
- Proactively research and uncover new fraud trends. By conducting ongoing research and analysis into global fraud trends, businesses’ fraud models will always stay one step ahead of emerging fraud and abuse trends. A proactive approach to fraud prevention means the merchant’s fraud team can take calculated measures to mitigate fraud and maximize the company’s revenue opportunities.
- Tailor your fraud model to your specific business needs. A fraud prevention partner that is able to tailor the fraud model on an ongoing basis to meet changing consumer behaviors, expectations, and the dynamic nature of fraud, means the business will always be protected but never turn away good customers.
- Streamline customer experience. New customers often have the highest expectations of service. If your business fails to deliver, whether due to friction in the checkout process or delays in delivery resulting from lengthy fraud review processes, these new customers are less likely to return. A fully automated platform streamlines decisioning across all customer touch points, removing friction for existing customers and new shoppers alike.
Benefits to Your Business
- Accurately distinguish legitimate customers from fraudsters, or abusers through advanced analytics, a robust global data network, and machine learning to reduce false positives and ensure new, legitimate customers are never rejected.
- Boosts approval rates, brand loyalty, customer trust, and revenue by removing unnecessary friction and false positives in consumer transactions.
- Reduces costs and delays by automating approve/decline decisions in real time without reliance on manual reviews.
- Stay ahead of the fraudsters and catch otherwise unknown patterns of fraud, by analyzing a depth of data resources from inside the company and across enterprises across the globe with a Global Data Network.
Find out more about our fully integrated fraud prevention platform at www.forter.com.
