Dating company improved customer satisfaction, reduced churn and cut human work by 70%
‍

‍“I was very sceptical to try Utopia AI, since we have tried a lot of tools that promised magic, but ultimately always fell short. With Utopia it was different, we saw exceptionally accurate results on the content being sent for moderation right from the start.” Max Deshkevich, Director of Moderation and Customer Safety at First Beat Media

The challenge: Slow, and at times, ineffective moderation

• Poor user experience due to scam, fraud, and other inappropriate behaviour
• Churn and chargebacks from users and customers
• Risk associated with non-compliance with new regulations
• Growing workload and rising moderation costs

‍

The solution: AI-based moderation for dating profile texts

• Improved moderation speed and quality
• Better user experience resulting in reduced churn and chargebacks
• Manual moderation work reduced by 70%, improving work satisfaction
• Resources could be reallocated to customer service and proactive ‘Spam hunting’

1. Challenges

First Beat Media had been dealing with a wave of content moderation issues on their platforms. Romance scammers, escorts, card fraudsters and other unacceptable behaviour on the sites had led to deteriorating user experience. This was causing higher churn and chargebacks from users and customers.

The situation had worsened when stricter regulations related to content publishing had been introduced. Non-compliance could result in fines from regulators and terminations from customers. As a result, the content moderation team was under growing pressure. The increasing workload had started to compromise the moderation quality and the expansion of the team had also significantly increased the operational costs.

‍

2. Earlier approaches

For the last 8 years, First Beat Media had been using a traditional moderation approach: A combination of rule-based automation and manual content moderation. The company had built its own custom fraud mitigation software that included elements such as IP/proxy detection, GEO blocking, black/whitelisting and profile filtering. The software-led approach was complemented by a team of human moderators who would resolve the less obvious cases.

However, new scammers with ever-changing tactics kept emerging, making it challenging for the software to keep up. Manual moderation workload correspondingly grew, making it prone to increased human error. It had become clear that a new approach was required to solve these issues, and to future-proof the operations.

‍

3. Solution

Utopia’s solution was to build a tailor-made AI moderation model based on First Beat Media’s earlier human moderation decisions. The plan was to train the AI to mimic human decision making, making it much more effective and efficient in catching unacceptable content, automatically. All that was needed from First Beat Media was historical data, and a light-weight integration to Utopia API. As Utopia’s AI-based approach was recommended to First Beat Media by a trusted expert in the industry, they decided to pilot it for tagline moderation.

It took only two weeks for Utopia to build the AI model, and the integration was completed in two days. As the pilot was started, First Beat Media saw promising results immediately, and as they wanted to save more on human resources, they requested adding usernames to the automation, so the full profile texts could be moderated. The AI model was quickly retrained and the pilot was run for another month.

‍

4. Results

First Beat Media was impressed with the results of the pilot and decided to start using the solution in their day to day operations. The tool has proven to be more accurate than a group of humans and it can operate 24/7. Ultimately, First Beat Media saw a remarkable improvement in terms of moderation speed, content quality, user experience and moderator wellbeing. They can now pre-moderate all profiles (both new and edited) and publish all acceptable ones in real-time. This, combined with improved quality of moderation, has resulted in lower churn and less chargebacks.

As Utopia AI handles the vast majority of moderation, manual moderation workload has been reduced by 70%. This has allowed reallocating human focus to other important tasks such as proactive “spam hunting”, which they previously didn’t have enough time to do. Reduced workload also minimises decision fatigue and thus improves moderator’s satisfaction.

‍

About First Beat Media

First Beat Media Inc. is a US-based online entertainment media company whose main focus is niche online dating. The company takes pride in their huge portfolio of dating platforms that flourish connections between people with varied backgrounds and interests. In addition to niche online dating platforms, the company focuses on marketing, advertising and media.