Data quality is a challenge that the market research industry continues to face. While there are many things impacting this important metric, one key contributor to negative outcomes is fraud. As technology use continues to rise in the industry – with many benefits – so do the opportunities for bad behaviour – or fraudulent activity.
Cint’s Oscar Carlsson writes more about these issues in his latest article for Greenbook called “Battling Fraud Through Innovation: Your Data Quality Depends on it.” He acknowledges that traditional approaches to fraud mitigation are no longer sufficient and that fraud is actually on the rise. “At Cint, we track a multitude of data points, so this increase in fraud is not just conjecture. When tracking subsets of data relating to fraud, we have been seeing patterns that indicate fraud is growing.” In order to get a handle on it, Cint dived into the data to identify the exact types of fraud that are impacting quality, including things like ghost completes.
The article then considers ways in which we can start to use innovative techniques and best practices to combat these behaviours, such as:
- Sharing knowledge and information that is gathered along all parts of the value chain to help build a complete picture.
- Securing traffic by choosing methods like secure server-to-server approaches over standard redirects.
- Employing a wide range of fraud mitigation tools, by coupling traditional mitigation techniques with new dynamic approaches using artificial intelligence and machine learning.
Oscar encourages the insights industry to take fraud seriously and make investments in tools and techniques that will reduce its instance. This means taking a “dynamic” approach to keep up with increasingly sophisticated fraudsters, who are innovating their approaches to fraud just as we are innovating our approaches to battling it. He says “AI holds great promise on this front as it can quickly catch bad behaviour before it affects data quality through things like pattern recognition and introducing open-ended questions at different points throughout the survey.” The proprietary AI that Cint is using, which was part of its acquisition of P2Sample earlier this year, is already fighting the fight for our customers.
He concludes: “Challenges surrounding fraud are not going to be solved with one stroke of the AI-powered magic wand, but it is an innovation that holds great promise for the future of data quality. The battle against fraud is a race to stay ahead of organised fraudsters that are savvy and nimble. If the industry continues to work together to address these issues, high data quality will prevail.”
You can read the complete article here
