All in a day’s work

• Lavone Toh, business process improvement manager at 500-backed e-commerce platform Carousell spoke about measures the startup took to respond to market reactions to lockdown measures and social-distancing guidelines in an interview.
• Consumer behavior, such as buying and selling patterns across categories, changed throughout the pandemic in 2020.
• For Carousell, the key was using data to drive product decisions and anticipate users’ needs, with an appreciation for differences across countries and categories.

• By doing so, Lavone claims that the startup has been able to chart out initiatives that catered to what communities needed strategically.
• “This includes building automated workflows, using machine learning to develop our internal chatbot for our users to get their resolutions fast and accurately. This will help our operations remain robust and ensure our users are not affected in the event of unforeseen circumstances,” she added.
• To achieve its targets, Carousell engaged a customer service platform for its self-service solutions. One such solution is a virtual assistant that guides users to find the answers they need easily via relevant Help Centre articles without reaching out to Carousell’s service agents.
• The service logs an average of 30,000 tickets a month, with 77% responded to in less than a day.
• Having an improved customer support function has helped Carousell combat fraud, which Lavone describes as “like an arms race” because scammers innovate as quickly as the platform does.
• She explained that when the pandemic hit, opportunistic individuals tried to profit from masks and sanitizers by overpricing them. The startup then took the unprecedented decision to moderate listings based on prices set by the government (where available), or an internally developed benchmark (in countries where the government does not set the price).
• Carousell also noticed new suspicious activities as panic-buying became rampant, discovering that scammers put up listings on the marketplace without the intention of fulfilling buyers’ orders.
• “We had to activate our teams to scan the marketplace frequently. More importantly, we stepped up on the review rate of flags our community of users sends to us so that we take action on bad actors and fraudulent listings with little delay. We also configured our internal keyword detection tool to trigger a safety tip message to the users when it detects potential suspicious activity in chats,” she shared.
• According to Lavone, due to Carousell’s efforts, the platform saw the fraud rate spike in February 2020, dropping month to month and going back pre-Covid levels by June across its markets.
• What will the startup do next in 2021? Lavone said that it is vital for the platform to keep pace with evolving trends and customer needs. “One example is building automated workflows for a more consistent experience. Using automations for general enquiries and repetitive tasks will give service agents more time to focus on value-added interactions, increase overall efficiency, and ensure consistency as we scale,” she concluded.
• Read the full interview here.

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