How to decide what Trust & Safety KPIs to track
I'm Alice Hunsberger. Trust & Safety Insider is my weekly rundown on the topics, industry trends and workplace strategies that trust and safety professionals need to know about to do their job.
When Trust & Safety works, the result is no harm done. But how do you measure this as an outcome? This week I'm continuing my “How To” series: this week we’re looking at how to build a measurement program that keeps you honest about whether things are working, and not just vanity metrics.
Get in touch if you'd like your questions answered or just want to share your feedback. Please send along questions, comments, feedback, rants, raves, existential problems…. I hope to dedicate an upcoming edition of the newsletter to questions I get from EiM subscribers and via LinkedIn.
Here we go! — Alice
For the month of May, T&S Insider will be guest-edited by Georgia Iacovou, author of Horrific/Terrific
How to measure T&S impact
I used to be head of T&S at a platform that used a BPO for moderation. One day I went digging into our QA scores. We'd been seeing user complaint patterns that didn't match the picture the metrics painted. The QA scores looked excellent week after week, with the moderation team hitting accuracy targets that any T&S leader would be happy with. But the complaints kept coming, and I wanted to understand the gap.
What I found was that the QA team and the moderation team were both working from a slightly out-of-date version of the spam and scam guidelines. Nobody had done anything wrong; the space was moving fast and the documentation simply hadn't kept up. The moderation team were seeing new patterns that the QA rubric did not yet reflect. So everyone was being scored against documentation that was missing the things that actually mattered. The aggregate numbers looked great, but the actual enforcement had real gaps — and the moderators, who are best positioned to see those gaps, had no structured way to surface this into the policy or measurement work.
I later ended up running the Trust & Safety line of business at a BPO myself, where I tried to structure our internal teams specifically to avoid this problem. I learned that the dynamic I'd seen from the platform side wasn't unusual, and this represents what I think is the most important pattern to understand in T&S measurement: it’s the difference between metrics that look good and metrics that mean something.