Enterprise Times met up with Aaron Begner, GM EMEA at Forter. Forter describes itself as the trust platform for digital commerce. Increasingly, brands, retailers and merchants are taking an omni-channel approach to customer engagement, which means trust is the vital ingredient. Forter’s solution provides merchants with the understanding of the identity and legitimacy of users at any point in their customer journey. Aaron provides his top four tips for organisations looking to create company or brand trust in the digital world.
1. Create consistency
Create consistency across all customer touchpoints. Establishing trust with the user involves using the right platform and tools to establish the trust foundation right at the beginning of the relationship. Tools that correctly establish the identity of customers. Once you have established trust, everything else kind of flows from it.
2. Stop being conservative about managing risk
Review the organisation’s reliance on heavily restricted practices. Stop being very conservative in how enterprises think about managing risk. There remains a huge number of merchants that rely on using data to drive strategy around fraud and fraud controls. Data that controls how enterprises manage risk. They have legacy systems that rely heavily on rules. Unfortunately, these kinds of rules become almost obsolete as soon as they have been written.
3. Throw away your static rules
This comes back to utilising static rules that define how organisations engage with different kinds of customers. Business rules that may be based on geography or transaction value and not leveraging the insights today’s digital engagement provides. When businesses make decisions on those static insights, it does not inform them if applicants are legitimate or fraudulent.
Enterprises having restrictive practices that focus on internal risk using old practices is detrimental to developing trust. Those restrictive practices cannot keep up with the modern age of the legitimate consumer, particularly with Gen Z consumers. Gen Z customers have a more complex digital persona, which cannot be controlled using service levels. Businesses need the ability to recognise returning customers and treat them accordingly. Even if they have a completely different profile.
4. Plan the process of removing friction
Do not assume that an enterprise can just remove friction from the customer process and it’s not going to have an impact. Organisations must be very thoughtful about this – it is not just payment. The whole customer journey must be investigated. This includes registration, how customers need to enter a password to go through the authentication processes. Returns policy and procedures.
Read Enterprise Times interview with Aaron Begner where he further elaborate on the importance of building trust in eCommerce. Earlier in the month, Forter launched its inaugural 2023 Consumer Trust Premium Report which explores how consumers truly feel about their online shopping experiences.
