With present-day consumers exposed to ongoing phishing attempts via channels like email and SMS, maintaining consumer trust in digital communications becomes a significant challenge for organizations. Whether the sender is a bank, a healthcare provider, or a delivery company, the person on the other end must know they're truly who they claim to be. Otherwise, how can they open links or act upon requests in good conscience?
As a seasoned provider of a digital postbox solution, e-Boks has accumulated quite a lot of insights about the trust-related challenges organizations and consumers face. I spoke with Helena Cimber, Product Director at e-Boks, to discuss these challenges and see what can be done to reestablish trust.
Phishing 101: Broken Trust and Potential Consequences
Phishing attempts have been causing damage that extends to more than a broken sense of trust, resulting in quantifiable consequences for organizations and consumers:
"In a survey conducted in Denmark, they saw many real emails that were not clicked through due to the recipients mistaking them as phishing," Cimber notes.
This not only demonstrates how the growing awareness of phishing changes user behavior in practice, but also indicates email's difficulty in catering to users' current safety and security needs.
"If the survey participants received those emails through a secure digital postbox service like e-Boks, the question of their legitimacy would be a no-brainer," Cimber says.
Missing information due to mistaking a legitimate message for phishing is one thing, but what about the practical consequences? A message might contain a request for the user to act upon (like paying a bill or signing a form), and if they fail to do so, this can be costly for both the sender and the receiver.
"For consumers, this can result in fines or other unwanted consequences. For organizations, it often means sending the document by post instead, which is both more expensive and much slower," Cimber explains.
The Four Pillars of Consumer Trust
That being said, it's clear that ethics and compliance are the backbone of wat providers like e-Boks do in digital communications. But how exactly can they be followed to protect consumer trust? Here are four key elements to consider.
Transparency: According to Cimber, clear communication with customers is absolutely essential for preserving or restoring trust.