Reducing Spam & Scams: A Rapid Design Sprint Approach

Project Snippet

I led and fascilitated a rapid design sprint to tackle rising spam and scam issues, aiming to reduce fraud-related support tickets by 50%. In just half a day, I collaborated with cross-functional teams to develop and implement solutions that enhance user trust and security, including improved reporting features and increased transparency

The Team

  • Design sprint facilitator

  • Product Manager

  • Tech Lead

  • Android engineer

  • iOS engineer

  • BI Analyst

  • QA team member

  • Growth team member

  • CLM team member

The Approach

To address the issue, the Business Intelligence, Customer Support, and Product & Tech teams collaborated to implement short-term solutions. Due to time constraints, we conducted a design sprint in just half a day, ensuring the entire team could participate.

Fortunately, half a day proved sufficient, as we already had a clear understanding of the problem and a defined objective: to reduce Customer Support tickets labeled “I want to report a fraud” by 50%.

Important discussed HMWs topics

  • Empower users to flag spam/scam

  • Increase transparency for users to make an informed decision

  • Raise awareness on Scams to all users

  • Prevent blocked users from coming back

  • Protect genuine user

Screenshot from our collaborative slides

What were the challenges/limitations?

  • Reporting for wrong reasons

  • Scammers might have better technology than us (outsmart us)

  • How does this impact the other metrics

We identified 3 target moments in the customer's journey

  • Contact: As a seller, I don’t feel safe revealing my phone number during chat when I don’t have enough information on the buyer. HMW create enough transparency for both Sellers & Buyers to build enough trust.

  • Compare: As a buyer, I don’t know enough about dubizzle’s reputation when I’m comparing buying new items to buying second-hand items. HMW raise awareness on dubizzle’s successful transactions, and raise enough awareness on scams & spams without creating panic to increase trust in dubizzle.

  • Explore: As a buyer, I don’t have enough information on the seller’s reputation/history. HMW increase seller’s transparency and create easy identification for old/loyal users. HMW reward them better?

The Solution

The following solutions emerged from the design sprint:

  • Enhance the Block/Report Feature

  • Improve Seller/Buyer Profiles

  • Streamline Communication (via CLM)

  • Create a safer environment through login and phone verification

  • Add Contact Options

  • Implement Additional Blocking Levels

In this context, I will focus on how we enhanced safety on Dubizzle by strengthening login and phone verification processes.

A safer place - log in & phone verification

We enhanced safety by implementing phone number verification and encouraged users to login by providing clearer insights into the benefits of logging in by communicating what they gain from doing so.

Problem Statement

Phishing, chat abuse, and scam from sellers are our key concerns in customer support tickets. This is mainly because we do not verify our users through phone numbers.

We have anonymous users, logged in users, and verified users. All of these users don't go under any form of verification before making a lead on our platforms. (making a lead means either taking the seller's phone number or chatting with them)

Success

Decline the reported fraud tickets against phishing, chat abuse, and scam.

Be mindful of any decline in leads or chats due to mandatory login.