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Smartproxy Created a Better User Experience and Reduced Customer Friction with Sift
Streamlined account review from 48 hours to under 2 minutes
Reduced customer escalations by 96%
OVERVIEW
A Leading Proxy and Web Data Gathering Solutions Provider
Smartproxy is the go-to proxy and web data gathering solutions provider. They are a trusted sidekick of data-driven businesses, helping them unlock publicly available data with ease. Smartproxy started off as a self-service-based proxy infrastructure, offering transparently sourced residential, mobile, and datacenter IPs worldwide. Today, having 65M+ IPs in 195+ global locations and powerful web scraping solutions in their product portfolio, the company aims to become the leading web data gathering platform and offer its users an infrastructure to test, launch, and scale their web data projects. Smartproxy has served more than 50K users across Fortune 500 companies and solopreneurs. Being awarded for the fourth year in a row as the Best Value Provider by Proxyway, Smartproxy offers a reliable and user-friendly web data collection ecosystem at affordable prices.
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CHALLENGE
An Inefficient Account Review Process
Smartproxy faced challenges in verifying the legitimacy of customer accounts through their existing process, which caused thousands of manual customer reviews each week. Their previous approach resulted in manual work that would take up to two business days for the Risk Management team to resolve, plus dissatisfaction among customers due to delays and additional investigation. To address these issues, Smartproxy aimed to completely overhaul their review process with two primary goals: ensuring a smooth payment experience by offering various payment methods, and implementing robust risk management to prevent fraud and secure customer accounts.
SOLUTION
Enhancing Fraud Detection and Customer Experience with Sift
Smartproxy’s first priority was blocking fraudulent user accounts and identifying suspicious activities while ensuring trusted customers have a smooth and frictionless experience. By selecting and implementing Sift’s AI-powered fraud solution, Smartproxy has successfully automated their account review efforts, enabling seamless user screening without interruptions or delays while keeping fraudulent activity off the platform.
Smartproxy is able to monitor extensive customer information with Sift to ensure accurate decisions, including email addresses, domains, and fraud patterns from the Sift Global Data Network. The team employs Sift Workflows to flag customers creating multiple accounts or using VPNs to falsify their location by identifying users that are connected to others via device or email, instantly deactivating and restricting their access if they’re deemed fraudulent. Sift’s flexibility allows easy modification of workflows, adding or removing criteria, and integrating with other tools to ensure comprehensive fraud protection and smooth customer onboarding. Smartproxy also utilizes the Workflow Simulation feature to test and measure automation adjustments before implementation.
Risk Managers use Sift daily to monitor new and recently updated accounts, leveraging workflows and risk scores to approve trusted users to join the platform, block fraudsters outright, or have potentially suspicious users go through additional screenings with Onfido. Sift’s integration capabilities with the ID verification platform help the team efficiently push screenings when questionable account activity arises, streamlining the verification process.
The team also monitors customer risk scores and performance, and when manual decisions are necessary, they report to management on the reasons behind triggered workflows, including monitoring registrations from restricted countries and detailing the outcomes of flagged customers. They report on flagged customers, watchlists, and workflow outcomes to maintain a secure user base.
RESULTS
Smartproxy Slashes Manual Review Time by 99% and Reduces Customer Support Emails by 96%
Since implementing Sift, Smartproxy has automated their account review process, significantly reducing the review time from 48 hours to as little as 30 seconds, or up to 2 minutes if additional screening is needed. This represents a roughly 99% decrease in processing time. Automating this process not only accelerated customer onboarding, but also drastically cut down on the number of customers flagged for potential issues—from around 15,000 annually to only a handful.
Previously, Smartproxy struggled to determine the legitimacy of customers due to their limited internal rules. However, Sift’s variety of customizable workflows allowed for more accurate identification of suspicious activity, resulting in fewer false flags. This shift led to a dramatic decrease in customer support emails, from around 50 per day to just 2, reflecting a 96% reduction. The real-time automation of processes has significantly reduced customer frustration, contributing to a more seamless and satisfactory user experience and freed up time for their risk team.