Blibli.com: When “Abuser” is a Customer, but Customer Satisfaction is #1
Pssst, this is not sarcasm, if you still not believe me, just sit down and read the article, I’ll explain it to you ;)
In this article, I wanna share the rule of thumb to detect an abuser and how we treat abusers. Before I explain further about how we detect and treat abusers, let me explain what is an abuser in our term.
If you search abuser in Google, it will give you this explanation
a person who uses something to bad effect or for a bad purpose. — Google, based on Oxford dictionary
Well, it’s not too far off from our term. We classify a customer as an abuser if a person or a group of people are violating our policy(promotion, refund, seller).
- What is the something? It’s the methods used by abusers, e.g. mass registration, merchant buyback, etc.
- What is the bad effect? It’s the goal of each policy’s subject that fails to be achieved, e.g. the promotion purpose is to gain new genuine customers by limiting 1 promo usage per account, but the promotion is used by the same abusers with multiple accounts.
- What is the bad purpose? Usually, the purpose is not bad, people want to gain the highest profit as soon as possible, so they abuse the marketplace.
Am I an Abuser?
Have you ever done shopping on an online marketplace and tell your friends/family to buy something for you with their account because it has 1 promo usage per account policy? Be careful, based on the marketplace’s policy you can be flagged as an abuser without you knowing it.
Yeah, you read it right, even though you do something that you think it’s insignificant, it can be a reason for you to be flagged as an abuser.
How does Marketplace Know That I am an Abuser?
Most of the online marketplace has its way to classify its customer as an abuser, its like a secret recipe. Let us take it this way, the technique is a secret recipe, data is the ingredients, and customer behavior is the spices.
Variety range of ingredients and spices
Where the ingredients and spices come from? Usually, it’s coming from farms or ranches. Do the same with your data, farm it! Farming doesn’t mean collecting raw data only, you will have to process it until its ready to be used as a variable to produce information.
Every time a customer doing a transaction in the marketplace, it will produce data like IP address, email, phone number, shipping address, etc. By using some kind of tracker you also can track the customer behavior when they’re doing a transaction, like how long the time a customer needs to complete the checkout process, how the mouse cursor movement looks, etc. Process this data and customer behavior by pairing it to each other and you will be shocked by how much new information it can produce, after that it’s time to cook the data using your “own” special secret recipe.
An original secret recipe
Everybody wanna be the best, but to be the best is not enough. Because you have to be original. — Chef Juna Rorimpandey
It’s the same as how every people have their secret recipe for cooking Indomie to suit their taste. Maybe you can take some random technique on the internet and implement it, but it’s not enough. The technique has to be fine-tuned depending on the marketplace’s business needs.
After you’ve aggregated all the data and the customer behaviors, you will have many questions. “Why these 100 customers have weird email domain and identical email prefix?” or “Why these customers always buy the same thing at the same time every week?”, starting from that questions you can use the patterns to decide how you want to decide your “own” abuser. Some marketplace may decide if a group of customers that have the same email domain will be flagged as abusers, or the other marketplace will have another strategy to use that data by flagging it as abusers only when the customer buying flash sale items. Once again, it depends on each marketplace’s business needs.
How Blibli Treat an Abuser, but Still Held High Customer Satisfaction #1
In Blibli, we take the abuser problem seriously. But this doesn’t mean we have to solve it by blaming the customer for all of it and permanently banned every abuser. Banning our customers is not always a solution for us. Even if a customer already flagged as an abuser, we still respect them as our customers.
Even though you’re getting caught red-handed abusing, we’ll not straight forward banned your account. We’ll calculate your behavior and your abused order history. Using that we can decide to allow your transaction to be processed or not. Maybe depending on your current account behavior, your past abuse has been forgiven and your account not flagged as an abuser anymore.
Blibli promotion and its funtastic abuser
I can assure you, in every promotion we create, there will be abusers(many and many of them…). Honestly, the abusers are not causing direct financial loss to us but causing opportunity loss. Wait, what opportunity? The opportunity to gain a GENUINE, LOYAL, and NEW customer.
There is another problem we have to face regarding our promotions and its abuser, that is the phantom promo problem. Have you ever had an experience, where the marketplace is offering a discount by using certain promo codes at a specific time? But even though you use it exactly at the specific time, it tells you the promo quota is already gone. Yep, you guess it right, most of the promo quota is used up by abusers. This is a problem we have to solve because what the abusers do is causing a bad experience for our genuine customers. We are focusing a lot on our customer acquisition and customer retention because acquisition creates a foundation of customers while the retention strategy is how we build customer relationships and maximize revenue for each one.
How we solved it? We have our own formulation, and I believe that this formulation will be different for each marketplace based on how big they wanna bear the risk and how to keep synergy between the customer, business, and tech.
Sorry, I can only tell you how we generally treat our abuser, because remember there is a secret in the secret recipe. It has to be kept secret :)
With the great promotion, comes great mass registration
In addition to promotion abuse, usually comes a mass registration. Mass registration is a situation where many fake accounts controlled by some people are registering all at once in a certain period. The pattern can be like 5 new accounts registered per day and its spread out within an hour interval for its every execution. This fake account is the account that will be used by the abuser to do promotion abuse, flash sale abuse, etc.
This is a problem for us, a marketplace that depends on its customer. Maybe some people will think, “Hey, that’s not a problem, right? The fake account pays you the same money as a genuine customer and its a genuine money you got there, not a fake one”. Nope, it’s not okay at all, first, it’s only okay when we’re doing promotion because those accounts will not be doing any transactions without promotion, and second, they’re taking the quota that should be used by the genuine customer. So what do we do with those accounts? We analyze and group it. Based on the grouping result we can decide whether to let it go to be monitored or block it.
Conclusion
As a customer, you will not know if you are flagged as an abuser until the marketplace has taken action for your abuse and you don’t have to worry about that. We know our customers very well and we held high our customer satisfaction #1. Our progress in cleaning up the abusers is still a long…long…long… way to go, but its a great sign that the company is growing and try its best to give their customers the best experience. So, just keep shopping and be healthy guys. See you in the next article.
