Building a successful Trust and Safety division at a marketplace starts with establishing why the platform needs it, and then selling that need to other marketplace stakeholders. From there, it’s a matter of selecting the right team members and setting standards for both marketplace employees and users. Of course, it also requires being able to adapt to changing circ*mstances.
The process of putting an effective Trust and Safety program together for a marketplace looks like this:
Step 1: Evaluate the marketplace’s needs and decide on roles
Collect and review data on the marketplace’s current Trust and Safety situation, including talking to employees, users, and even teams at similar companies. Learn which issues the marketplace is facing (and will likely face), and which solutions will likely help the most.
From there, put together a template for how the Trust and Safety team will be built. It will likely need people for general oversight, operations oversight, content moderation, public relations, engineering, and legal.
Step 2: Get other marketplace leaders and departments to buy in
The next key to creating and filling out a Trust and Safety team is to make a case for its value to senior marketplace personnel. Point out where the marketplace’s current Trust and Safety operations could use improvement, and – when possible – quantify how much current solutions are saving the company in resources (especially money).
Also talk to other departments such as product, customer experience, marketing, and sales. Make cases for how Trust and Safety can smooth out each of their operations without them having to do extra work or hire extra people.
Step 3: Clearly outline policies and procedures
Make sure to thoroughly outline the marketplace’s Trust and Safety guidelines for purposes such as moderating community conduct and internal training. The former will build trust with the user base by reducing confusion surrounding what is or is not allowed on the marketplace. The latter will make onboarding new Trust and Safety team members faster and easier.
Step 4: Keep communication open to maintain flexibility
Abusive marketplace users will continually invent new tactics, techniques, and procedures to test what they can get away with on a marketplace platform. For example, certain offensive slang terms and symbols, or pieces of misinformation, won’t always be covered by a marketplace’s current Trust and Safety policy.
That’s why it’s important to encourage open conversations about what Trust and Safety team members find out about these new threats. This will help in revising both internal and external guidelines to keep them current.
Step 5: Ensure morale stays high
Working in Trust and Safety can be difficult, as it inherently involves dealing with a marketplace’s most abusive users. Offer health benefits (especially surrounding mental wellness), and schedule regular check-ins to get a sense of what headspace each member of the team is in.
Foster a culture of interdependence where team members know they can reach out to each other for help if things get tough.
