Detecting and preventing fraudulent actions
Antavo’s expanding fraud detection and prevention tools can be used when a customer’s point accumulation is exceedingly high to fit the ground rules of your loyalty program.
You can choose between different admonitions to be carried out in the Backoffice. For example, you can use the Aggregated attributes workflow node to subsequently suspend the registration of the point–earning event and then send a cautionary reminder to the customer about the loyalty program’s terms of use. Also, you can opt out or block the customer, or choose to suspend them temporarily. If you’d like to make sure that the point-earning rules during a campaign are well-established and protected at a system level, defining point caps for campaigns is a possible solution.
This guide describes a scenario when a suspicious customer action is filtered out by a pre–configured workflow, followed by a warning email. Then it goes on to show how to suspend and therefore prevent potential fraudsters from spending their existing loyalty points. Finally, the last chapter links you to the configuration of point limitations within a campaign.
Set up workflows using the ‘Aggregated attributes’ filter
Automated workflows are capable of filtering out suspicious user actions by using the Aggregated attributes filter node. This filter makes it easy to build workflows that keep track of how many points individual members have collected and helps to identify suspiciously high point gains.
Prerequisite
Make sure that the Customer aggregations extension is switched on. Please submit a ticket through the Antavo Service Desk if you need this to be set up in your brand.
You can warn the customer about excessive point earnings in your program. This workflow monitors the past week’s point earnings and sends out a warning email to the customer who had reached a certain threshold of points in their overall earnings.
Follow these steps to create this workflow:
Open Workflows management and click the Create new general workflow page
Name the workflow and click ‘Create’
Drag and drop an ‘Event’ trigger to the canvas.
Define the type of event on which the workflow should run.
select ‘Point add’
Click the 'Update' button.
Next, scroll down to the Fraud prevention group among the Filters node categories on the right-hand side of the page. Chose Aggregated customer attributes and drag and drop it to the canvas.
Date range – monitor the date range of the current day by selecting 'week to date'
Customer – if you pick ‘current customer’, the customer who is affected by the current workflow execution will be monitored
Aggregation type – select ‘earned’, which signals all scores that the customer has earned during their loyalty membership
Threshold – type here the value of points that would be considered unrealistic in your loyalty program
In the subsequent node, you can trigger an email to the customers informing them about the terms and conditions of your loyalty program. Use the Trigger marketing communication action node for this measure.
Select the external event to be triggered using the dropdown list.
Enter the key and value of the event data to be sent in the payload of the event
You can add multiple data fields to the payload using the ‘Add’ button.
Suspend the customer from the loyalty program
Assigning a ‘Suspended’ status to suspicious loyalty member accounts stops their point spending temporarily. While suspended, they cannot spend their existing points but earning points through purchases still works. This is a viable way to quarantine potential fraudsters while investigating their case and you can unsuspend them any time so they will be able to earn points as before.
The suspend and unsuspend actions can be executed manually from the Backoffice, and also through initiating a workflow with the Trigger event node.
Suspend the customer manually
Go to the configuration page of the Customer Insights menu by clicking on the icon in the sidebar.
Use the Exports module by clicking on ‘Export customers’ on the left-hand side to gain data about your customers' point earnings.
In case you find out that a user has breached the threshold of the point-earning rules of your program, go to their customer profile.
Click the Events tab on the left-hand side.
Choose the ‘Suspend - Suspend customers if you want to prevent them from spending points.’ option from the dropdown.
Click ‘Save’.
After the customer has been suspended, the status is also indicated on the main page of the Customer Insights module, next to the customer's name.
Suspend the customer through the Workflows module
You can monitor excessive point earning through campaign bonuses, and subsequently, suspend the customer in your program using this workflow.
Follow these steps to create this workflow:
Open Workflows management and click the Create new general workflow page
Name the workflow and click ‘Create’
Drag and drop an ‘Event’ trigger to the canvas.
Define the type of event on which the workflow should run.
select ‘Campaign bonus’
Click the 'Update' button.
Next, scroll down to the Fraud prevention group among the Filters node categories on the right-hand side of the page. Chose Aggregated customer attributes and drag and drop it to the canvas.
Date range – monitor the date range of the current day by selecting 'Today'
Customer – if you pick 'All customers (audience)', the workflow monitors every loyalty member with the score' filter applied above
Aggregation type – select ‘bonus’ which signals the points collected from campaign bonuses
Threshold – type here the value of points that would be considered unrealistic in your loyalty program
In the subsequent node, you suspend the user temporarily from the loyalty program. Use the Trigger event action node for this measure.
Customer – leave this field blank as the workflow monitors the entire customer database
Action – choose Suspend from the dropdown
Click ‘Update'
The Workflow will then put those customers who have earned more than 3000 points through a campaign that given day to ‘Suspended’ status.
Stop suspicious activity by applying point limitations to your campaigns
You can determine the limit of bonus points to be distributed during the course of a campaign. This point cap can be defined on the campaign level (limiting how many points can be given away during the campaign) and on the individual customer’s level (limiting how many points can one person earn).
Moreover, there are three options that can be selected as campaign bonus behavior for an action that exceeds the bonus limit.
A soft limit – assign all bonus points only for the last action below the limit, even if the limit is exceeded
A dynamic limit – dynamically reduces the number of bonus points assigned for the last action to ensure that the limit is not exceeded
Hard limit – assign no bonus points for an action that would exceed the limit
Read more about configuring campaigns and point limitations here and read this guide for examples for each scenario.
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