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Drive Loyalty and Protect Exclusive Offers with AI-Powered Verification

Published Date
Author Christine Reyes

Offering exclusive discounts to groups like students, healthcare workers, and the military is a tried-and-true way for brands to acquire new customers and earn longtime loyalty. Members of these groups feel recognized and appreciated by these discounts — and 71% report having greater loyalty to brands that offer them exclusive deals. 

But as fraudsters become more sophisticated, brands are struggling to protect their high-value offers and the revenue they generate, while still being able to leverage the offers to build more authentic customer relationships. Offer abuse is now the most common type of consumer fraud, and businesses stand to lose up to 2.2% of their annual revenue to bad actors. 

This is why verifying your customers’ eligibility for exclusive offers is an essential step. In addition to preventing financial losses, verification ensures that only customers who are eligible for your offer can redeem it. This obviously protects your bottom line, but it also increases brand trust and makes your customers feel truly valued, which drives loyalty.  

Brands can verify eligibility in a few different ways, but not all are created equal:

  • Manual verification: Your in-house team reviews and approves eligibility through manual processes. While you directly manage all of your customer data, this approach takes a lot of time and is vulnerable to human error. Customers may be frustrated by longer wait times or inaccurate responses. 
  • Off-site verification: Your brand relies on an off-site verification provider that typically requires customers to create a separate account within its marketplace and often share sensitive, personally identifiable information (PII). These extra steps create friction, leading to lower conversions and making customers more vulnerable to a security breach. Off-site verification also prevents your brand from having exclusive, real-time access to the verified permissioned data your customers share to access your exclusive offer. 
  • White-label, on-site verification: Your customers complete a verification process within your brand experience, such as a checkout flow or loyalty app. This approach enables you to deliver a seamless CX and ensure the data you collect is accurate—and that you maintain exclusive control of it. SheerID’s Audience Data Platform (ADP) provides all this, streamlining your purchase process, verifying and protecting your customer data, and improving your bottom line. 

White-label, on-site verification is highly effective. Our ADP has prevented more than $4 billion in reward-code theft. But fraudsters are using AI to create more sophisticated and scalable scams that exploit exclusive offers. So we’re fighting back by leveraging AI to create even more robust offer protection.

Using AI to Enhance Offer Protection

Powerful offer protection begins with authoritative data sources. SheerID’s Individual Verification Engine (IVE) uses 200K+ global authoritative data sources to instantly verify that a customer belongs to your target audience and meets the specific criteria for your exclusive offer. 

Our IVE then uses next-gen AI to build a comprehensive, multi-layered approach to verification that goes beyond simple database lookups and provides faster verification, fewer false rejections, and greater protection.

This fall we’re rolling out AI-driven capabilities that level up our IVE’s power to protect offers and mitigate fraud:

  • Autonomous Data Discovery accelerates the research and addition of data about institutions like universities and workplaces, improving the precision of information by 20% and reducing the time to add new institutions from hours to seconds. 
  • Real-Time Anomaly Detection constantly monitors verification traffic for unusual spikes in activity, and automatically takes action to protect brands from offer abuse. 
  • Advanced Document Forgery Detection identifies signs of forgery and tampering in uploaded files, making it significantly harder for scammers to manipulate images manually or with the aid of generative AI. 
  • Intelligent Document Verification extracts key information from documents more accurately, preventing the rejection of legitimate documents and providing a smoother, faster, and more secure experience.

Together these AI-powered tools create an intelligent and automated defense that gives brands a secure and proactive way to combat offer abuse, maximize conversions, and engage high-value customers. 

All these capabilities are powerful, but every brand will have different thresholds of acceptable risk for different offers. SheerID’s approach is adaptive and can be configured to match risk tolerance and tailored to brand needs.

And since these adaptive offer protections are built on sophisticated machine learning models, the system constantly learns and improves. When the model identifies a new pattern of deceptive behavior, it incorporates that information moving forward, enhancing its ability to spot malicious actors or methods of falsifying documents. 

Improving Customer Experiences and Driving ROI With Multi-Layer Protection

Advanced offer protection is a win-win for everyone — except fraudsters.

Brands see more conversions, higher campaign ROI, and greater engagement with their most valuable consumer  audiences. And members of those groups will be able to access their exclusive discounts faster, without the added friction of having to create a third-party account or be manually verified. 

For example, after switching from in-house authentication to SheerID’s white-label verification, leading brands see results like:

  • 18x higher ROI for military offer compared to other programs at Princess Cruises
  • 68% increase in student acquisition at YNAB
  • 50%+ more conversions at Unity Technologies

At the same time, those valuable offers are protected from discount abuse and kept exclusive for eligible customers, building trust and loyalty over time. 

AI-Powered Verification that Drives Revenue and Loyalty

Partnering with a trusted vendor that provides multi-layered, state-of-the-art verification protects your customers’ data and your offer, without compromising on customer experience. Learn more about offer protection with SheerID and how you can choose the level of protection your brand needs. 

You can see our ADP in action firsthand by contacting us to schedule a demo.