Online marketplaces are great platforms for people to exchange goods and services that would otherwise be difficult to get. But they tend only to work well when users can trust that other users are dealing in good faith.
The business that operates a marketplace has a role to play here. It must lay down rules for what is or isn’t allowed on the platform. It also needs to have a team of employees that investigates potential violations of those rules, and takes disciplinary action if necessary. These operations are collectively called Trust and Safety.
For some companies, this means a dedicated Trust & Safety department; but for many, Trust & Safety operations are a core component of risk and compliance management; whether teams know it or not.
This piece will explain more about what Trust and Safety is, why marketplaces need it, and what challenges it commonly faces. It will also offer tips for building Trust and Safety teams, measuring the success of operations, and other best practices.
Trust and Safety refers to tools and business practices a marketplace uses to protect its users and its own integrity. The goal of Trust and Safety is to promote trust among a marketplace’s users by identifying and limiting behaviors that present risks to users or the marketplace’s functionality.
Digital Trust and Safety is essential for marketplaces because it helps them retain users – both customers and merchants. Users who are allowed to be subjected to abuse in a marketplace have a greater risk of leaving that marketplace – and taking their business with them. So it’s in a marketplace’s financial interest to maintain a safe and fair platform that entices users to stay.
Some specific benefits of having dedicated Trust and Safety services for a marketplace include:
One of the biggest Trust and Safety challenges for online marketplaces is simply a lack of understanding, from both inside and outside the marketplace, of why these operations are necessary. Most focus is put on AML and CTF for the sake of regulatory compliance, and on anti-fraud to protect the marketplace from unnecessary losses.
Little attention is paid to the very real harm that online abuse can do to a marketplace’s users, and how much business the marketplace can end up losing as a consequence.
Other common issues online Trust and Safety teams face in marketplace settings include:
A larger marketplace may have a dedicated Trust and Safety team to handle operations and incidents. However, since Trust and Safety is a relatively new concept, some marketplaces – especially smaller ones – may not.
Marketplaces without dedicated teams may rely on their anti-fraud team to handle Trust and Safety issues. This is because many marketplace Trust and Safety abuses are forms of fraud, or are activities done with the intention of committing fraud later.
In some small marketplaces that have their anti-fraud and AML operations amalgamated as risk management, this department will likely deal with Trust and Safety matters.
Building a successful Trust and Safety division at a marketplace starts with establishing why the platform needs it, and then selling that need to other marketplace stakeholders. From there, it’s a matter of selecting the right team members and setting standards for both marketplace employees and users. Of course, it also requires being able to adapt to changing circumstances.
The process of putting an effective Trust and Safety program together for a marketplace looks like this:
Collect and review data on the marketplace’s current Trust and Safety situation, including talking to employees, users, and even teams at similar companies. Learn which issues the marketplace is facing (and will likely face), and which solutions will likely help the most.
From there, put together a template for how the Trust and Safety team will be built. It will likely need people for general oversight, operations oversight, content moderation, public relations, engineering, and legal.
The next key to creating and filling out a Trust and Safety team is to make a case for its value to senior marketplace personnel. Point out where the marketplace’s current Trust and Safety operations could use improvement, and – when possible – quantify how much current solutions are saving the company in resources (especially money).
Also talk to other departments such as product, customer experience, marketing, and sales. Make cases for how Trust and Safety can smooth out each of their operations without them having to do extra work or hire extra people.
Make sure to thoroughly outline the marketplace’s Trust and Safety guidelines for purposes such as moderating community conduct and internal training. The former will build trust with the user base by reducing confusion surrounding what is or is not allowed on the marketplace. The latter will make onboarding new Trust and Safety team members faster and easier.
Abusive marketplace users will continually invent new tactics, techniques, and procedures to test what they can get away with on a marketplace platform. For example, certain offensive slang terms and symbols, or pieces of misinformation, won’t always be covered by a marketplace’s current Trust and Safety policy.
That’s why it’s important to encourage open conversations about what Trust and Safety team members find out about these new threats. This will help in revising both internal and external guidelines to keep them current.
Working in Trust and Safety can be difficult, as it inherently involves dealing with a marketplace’s most abusive users. Offer health benefits (especially surrounding mental wellness), and schedule regular check-ins to get a sense of what headspace each member of the team is in.
Foster a culture of interdependence where team members know they can reach out to each other for help if things get tough.
Finding the right metrics to measure for Trust and Safety can be tricky. Part of this is because marketplaces in different industries have different priorities. It’s also because Trust and Safety is responsible for resolving rules violations on a marketplace, but its ultimate goal is to prevent those rules from being violated at all. And it’s difficult to measure events that could happen, but never actually do.
With that said, here are some suggested metrics to track:
In addition to the recommendations above, here are four other Trust and Safety best practices that marketplaces can follow to ensure smooth and secure operations.
A company’s Trust and Safety team should work closely with the Product team(s) to understand what kind of marketplace is being built, and how it’s being built. This provides an opportunity to consider and prepare for ways the marketplace could be abused, or even design the marketplace to prevent certain types of abuse.
A Trust and Safety team should develop conduct guidelines that are thorough, specific to the marketplace, and clear for users to understand. It should also publish these guidelines in a place that’s easily accessible for users.
Additionally, it should periodically release public reports on its tracked metrics to show users that the marketplace is making maintaining their trust and safety a top priority.
Trust and Safety can’t always catch every instance of abusive behavior on a marketplace by itself. That’s why it should consult with the Product team to implement a mechanism that lets users themselves report potentially abusive content or activities. Instructions for accessing and using this mechanism should be included in the marketplace’s community guidelines.
A Trust and Safety team should still have specific procedures in place in the event that a high-profile incident – such as a data breach or coordinated mass fraud – happens to the marketplace. The plan should first focus on how to protect users – including their accounts, money, and credentials. This should involve communicating to them what the nature of the incident is, as well as anything they should do to secure their assets.
It should also consider how to quickly but securely restart the marketplace’s operations after the incident has been resolved. Better yet, it should also cover how to keep the marketplace running safely while the incident is in progress.
Monitoring for, detecting, investigating, and taking action on threats to a marketplace is very inefficient to do completely manually. Despite their potential blindspots, automated Trust and Safety solutions are virtually essential for handling the volume and scope of potential abuses faced by modern digital marketplaces.
Schedule a demo with Unit21 to see how our Trust and Safety solutions for marketplaces help to automate abuse detection, investigation, and analysis to maintain marketplace safety and customer loyalty.