Sift Science Trust Advisory Board: Connecting with Our Customers

On May 8 in San Francisco, Sift Science welcomed our customers to our very first Trust Advisory Board (TAB) meeting. The mission of TAB is to bring together the best minds in the industry to prevent fraud and build trust across the internet. It also aims to advise Sift’s product, marketing, and sales teams in building a world-class solution for our customers.

Our meeting was enlightening and provided us with a clearer understanding of what our customers want and need in order to empower themselves to have the strongest fraud-fighting teams possible. Here are some of our most important takeaways from the event.

Validating Our Vision

Our CEO Jason Tan spoke to our guests about the vision of Sift and some of our post-Series D plans. We will deepen our product for existing use cases and build up our sales team to position ourselves as an enterprise solution. We are also moving into global sales expansion and are further developing our strategic partnerships and adjacent entry services.

Additionally, our Head of Product, Thomas Schiavone, described Sift’s evolution over time and how we’ve expanded our global network of customers, which in turn has made our global models stronger and smarter with the increase of data they’ve received. We’ve gone from simple models and a single customer to complex ensemble modeling, deep-learning text analysis, and billions of data points in just a few years – and the years to come promise even more exciting evolutions.

Taking the time to inform our customers not only of where we’ve been, but more importantly where we’re headed and what we have planned, is extremely important in building a reputation of being open, honest, and trustworthy. We work to uphold transparency on the internet – we should expect no less of ourselves when communicating with the customers that have put their trust in us. Through that transparency, our Trust Advisory Board validated our view of the fraud landscape, our product evolution plans, and the investments we plan to make with our recent Series D funding.

Nicole Grazioso, Director, Payments & Risk at SeatGeek appreciated Jason and Thomas taking the time to explain the course Sift is plotting: “I really enjoyed hearing from Sift Science leadership about how they plan to expand their ‘trust as a service’ vision over the coming months and years, including details from their product roadmap and positioning.”

Receive Feedback to Remain Grounded

While we’re innovating honesty and transparency in tech, it’s important for us to retain humility and listen to what our customers want and need from us. To avoid creating an echo chamber of our own thoughts and ideas, our product managers and product marketers led deep discussions for our Account Takeover and Content Abuse products to gather feedback on how those products can be further improved in the coming months. While we know each of our customers faces slightly different challenges with these abuse vectors, creating a space to go deep allowed us to discover some common pain points we’d like to address in our roadmap.

The feedback wasn’t just helpful for us – our customers also took away valuable insights from each other: “The TAB openly engaged the group for feedback on various parts of the product and business, and the responses were honest and enlightening. Chatting with folks who are facing similar challenges, and seeing similar successes, was incredibly valuable, and is not something normally fostered by vendors in this space.” – Nicole Grazioso, Director, Payments & Risk at SeatGeek

We also held a workshop on the Sift Science Console and reporting to hone in our customers’ needs around tooling and metrics. Particular focus was placed on discovering how false positive rates are measured and how much they impact an organization. We also had group activities around building an ideal manual review queuing system (regardless of whether a company is using our Manual Review Queues) to help drive feature planning on our console tools.

Build a Community

Listening to our customers isn’t just important for our growth as a company, but for assisting us in building a strong, connected community. We learned that our customers want to know more about each other and network; there is no one-size-fits-all solution in fraud, and customers want to know how other fraud teams are built, especially given that fraud comes in so many different forms. We took this feedback to heart and plan on facilitating more customer-to-customer interaction at future TAB meetings.

Our global Fraud Fighters Forums (FFFs) provide another great way for our customers to come together and share best practices outside of TAB meetings. In response to customers who expressed that fraud fighting can feel isolating, we created our FFFs so those on the front lines of fighting fraud have a place to connect and discuss their challenges. Implementing similar opportunities for networking customers at various levels will provide fraud fighters with another venue to learn from one another.

At the TAB meeting, Trust & Safety Architect Kevin Lee also spoke about the state of fraud and recent data breaches, putting into perspective how pervasive the problem is and creating a sense of camaraderie among our customers in the fight against fraud.

Customer Satisfaction is Paramount

We have great things planned for future TAB meetings, have taken into account the feedback we received, and look forward to checking in regularly with our customers to make our products even stronger and smarter. Let’s make the internet a safer place together!