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Holiday Shopping Moderation Guide for Content Moderation Teams

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    Ah, the holidays, truly the best time of year… for online fraud, if you allow it to be that way. Digital fraud attempts experience a 31% increase between Thanksgiving (hello, Cyber Monday) and the very end of December. As an online marketplace owner, you’re not the only one who needs to lookout for frauds. Scammers are also going after your users, creating more fraudulent ads trying to get their piece of the holiday spendings. As such, now is the best time for online marketplace owners to evaluate the effectiveness of their moderation, build truly robust strategies, and protect visitors coming through the site.

    Keep you and your moderation teams up to par this holiday season with this four-step evaluation process.

    Is your team up to speed?

    Even the most effective, highly-motivated teams need a reminder on workplace best practices. Revisiting rules is not a sign of weakness. How many times have you gotten stuck in the grind of daily duties and completely lost sight of some of the most important foundations of your job?

    Before diving into your holiday strategy, touch base with your team on some of the most important pillars of your content moderation strategy with the following resources and guides – are you using your moderation tools at full capacity?:

    How to detect & moderate duplicate items

    Choosing the right interface

    How to verify your moderation rules are matching the proper content

    Make sure all your filters are up to date and consider holiday-focused filters you might need to turn on. Think about what kind of new products or devices are coming out on the market. A team brainstorming session will help generate a new list of holiday-focused filter options.

    Get ahead by taking a look at the hottest digital gifts to break the marketplace this year.

    Evaluating your current strategy

    Start evaluating the strategy you have in place by first defining your team goals. What values do you hold as a site hosting UGC? Of course, the content is dependent on users, but what do you want to see, what don’t you want to see? What kind of user experience are you aiming for?

    If you don’t have frequent site reviews rolling in, form an internal test group to provide you with feedback on how easy it is to navigate your website. Write out a list of top priorities for your testers to report on including:

    • Duplicate ads
    • Spelling & grammar
    • Risky language
    • Low quality photos
    • Misleading offers
    • Customer service follow-up turnaround time
    • Site speed

    Your team’s internal communication and feedback structure is also important to evaluate during times of influx. Do you have a head leader or a panel of point-to leaders who manage executive decisions, new team members, and new processes or tools? How often do your teams meet? How do you gather and share knowledge and trends encountered in the day to day moderation work?

    Consider increasing your monthly meeting to a weekly meeting until all new team members are onboarded, all new tech has been implemented and tested, and any new processes are clear to everyone within the moderation team and company-wide. Especially if you’re onboarding a seasonal team, it’s wise to create a team bracket, where every person’s name, headshot, professional title, and general responsibilities are listed. This helps quickly identify a point-to person when specific issues arise on the spot.

    Learn more about building internal communication structures!

    Define what makes your site excellent to its users, test it to make sure you’re still holding up to your brand promise, and adjust areas, moderation processes and site rules where it is lacking.

    Consider team expansion

    Online holiday shopping is no joke. Getting behind on the manual review process can happen very quickly for teams both small and mighty or large and robust. Consider giving your team size a boost to cover your bases.

    Expert content moderation teams like Besedo, have an adaptable, customer-centric approach to online moderation and are always ready to help integrate with your existing specialists. Our agents are tested through both logic and linguistic tests to ensure cultural sensitivity and native language skills are accounted for.

    Ready to meet your holiday content moderation SWAT team? 

    Is it time to upgrade?

    Even if it seems like it’s too early to start spending more for holiday protection, it’s not. Cyber Monday hit its all time high in 2016, marking it the biggest day for online sales, ever. Take time now to evaluate your tools and see where there’s opportunity for a little extra security. This allows more time for your moderation team to evaluate current tools, adopt new processes as needed, and work out the kinks before the big day in November through the end of December.

    What tools do you rely on today that maybe don’t stretch to fit all your needs in the busy holiday season? You may have a knockout team and moderation strategy, but it could fall short when moderation volumes rise. Enter, Custom AI moderation. Custom AI provides site owners with a solution based on data specific to your site enabling a tailor-made automated moderation approach, for better accuracy and content control.

    It’s important for tools like Besedo’s custom AI moderation product to be implemented earlier rather than later to allow moderation teams to train the tool for future automation. Learn more about the training process and how these tools help supplement your teams during the holidays.

    Lock down on your holiday site protection strategy so your visitors can worry about the true joys of the holiday season. Ready to take your strategy through the roof? Give your moderation team a boost with Besedo moderation experts. Thinking about Custom AI models, but not sure if you’re ready for the big leap? Request a free proof of concept from our team!

    This is Besedo

    Global, full-service leader in content moderation

    We provide automated and manual moderation for online marketplaces, online dating, sharing economy, gaming, communities and social media.

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