[Ebook] Digital Trust and Safety for QSRs: Moving at the Speed of Trust

In the first quarter of 2019, french fry king McDonald’s took a daring leap into acquisition that’s typically been absent from the quick-service restaurant industry, and notably rare for the QSR giant in particular. The $300 million price tag was well worth it to the global goliath for the purchase of Dynamic Yield, an Israeli tech startup that helps retailers provide highly-customized digital promotions to consumers as they interact with drive-thru menus and kiosks. Using customer data streams, it allows merchants to serve up tailored offerings based on things like the weather, the location, or a person’s previous orders, ensuring that buyers get exactly what they want and then some.

This venture into innovative, real-time technology may be uncommon for fast food institutions now, but it won’t be for much longer. In an industry rife with demand for anytime access and anywhere delivery, it can’t be. QSRs with an eye on continued growth and customer satisfaction must embrace tools that enable both—without forcing company leaders to sacrifice one for the good of the other.   

Mobile and the modern diner

To no modern diner’s surprise, 60 percent of people who interact with QSRs depend solely on their mobile devices to help them decide what, where, and when to eat—whether it’s to refill the fridge or get date night desserts delivered. With a market base in the hundreds of millions, that’s no paltry number of online orders; and when 75 percent of the people ordering don’t start their food search with something exact in mind, quick-service merchants have a unique opportunity to influence those decisions through timely and customized experiences.

This ability to deliver the best experiences to every customer shouldn’t be limited to what merchants can market. After all, offering up a milkshake coupon during a heat wave isn’t worth much if the person behind the credentials is a fraudster. And in the QSR space, cyber criminals are well known for using online ordering systems as a testing ground for stolen information; it’s easy for them to take advantage of the notoriously short buying windows and dependence on lightning-fast decisioning about the legitimacy of a transaction or login. 

How Digital Trust and Safety makes a valuable difference

With user journeys that leave no room for manual review by trust and safety teams,  unnecessary friction and fraud can both balloon into unmanageable problems that corrode a company’s bottom line and push diners into the arms of competitors.  

Typically, QSRs have no fraud prevention solution in place at all, and sit at the mercy of their PSP’s ability to decline payments, or fraudsters’ lack of complete account information. When they do implement a prevention platform, it’s often one that’s built on static, reactive rules that can’t scale, hinder growth, and consistently cause user insult for trusted customers. In fact, a recent survey conducted by Sift found that 60 percent of companies using traditional fraud prevention end up blocking legitimate customers. Additionally, these rules aren’t even that good at keeping criminals from coordinating attacks; 45 percent of respondents reported that their rules-based solutions fail to effectively prevent fraud in the first place.

With Digital Trust & Safety, QSRs can align risk and revenue decisions by fundamentally evolving their fraud prevention strategy, from mindset and processes to technologies and platforms. By using real-time machine learning, as well as data from merchants and markets all over the world, it gives vendors the ability to accurately separate suspicious behaviors from legitimate ones in less than a second. Essentially, this approach helps businesses deliver superior experiences to trusted users and stop fraudsters from eating their revenue. 

In our new ebook, we take a deep dive into the state of fraud in this market, its particular vulnerabilities and opportunities, and how Digital Trust & Safety enables scalable, real-time fraud prevention for QSRs—with a large side of customer protection and unstoppable business growth. 

Click here to download the complete ebook.