In the Digital Age, customer experience is everything. When people have access to strong and far-reaching platforms like Twitter, Facebook, Instagram and YouTube, brands should be hyper-focused on how their cybersecurity hygiene affects not only their paying customers but their brand reputation.
When most executives think about customer experience, the first things that come to mind are chatbots, personalization and reward points. Bot mitigation is rarely a consideration, though it should be at the top of the list. Many organizations claim to be customer-centric, but how is that possible when the only thing protecting their customers’ data is a hastily installed CAPTCHA that’s easy for bots to get around and, in the end, ruins your user experience?
A site free of bad bots gives your customers the best user experience possible; one where they can navigate through your online store, add to their cart, and checkout without your website crashing or worse. With good user experiences, they will recommend your brand to their social circle and continue being a loyal customer for years to come.
On the other hand, a site that’s under attack will send your customers flocking to the competition.
What Your Customer Experiences During a Bot Attack
Bots come in many shapes and sizes. Some of them can be beneficial, like Google Bots, but most others are bad bots that wreak havoc on your site in the same amount of time it takes to brew your morning coffee.
Despite what you may think, not all bot attacks are DDoS attacks that can be solved by a WAF alone; they vary as much as the individual bots themselves. Here is what happens when a customer shops on your website after bad bots have filtered in:
- Your customer tries logging in only to find that their username and password combination isn’t working anymore. They use the ‘forgot password’ tool but their email is no longer recognized.
- The product they want is in high demand so they shop as a guest, adding the item, along with a few others to their cart. After a few minutes, they are ready to checkout but the one product they came for is suddenly missing. When they check the item to add it again, it is sold out.
- The customer purchases the rest of the products as a guest and goes to your competitor’s site for the item that was sold out on yours
- A few days later, the customer finds out that their credit card information was stolen while shopping on your site. It is now up for grabs on the Dark Web, along with their login credentials and reward points.
- Now, this once loyal customer is blasting your brand on social media to all of their friends and the post is being reshared thousands of times. You’ve not only lost millions in revenue, but you have single-handedly given your competition the upper hand.
This is just one example of how bad bots can hurt your customer experience and your brand reputation, but it’s significant and a real-world situation that happens often.
What Happened?
While you were brewing that cup of coffee, your website was under attack. Bots were moving in at a speed 1,000 times faster than a real human user. It took just under two minutes for these automated attackers to take over thousands of customer accounts and steal personally identifiable information to be sold on the dark web.
The second situation was your competitor who had sent their own bots to hoard the in-demand item in a shopping cart. The purpose of this was to show the product as ‘sold out’ on your website and direct your traffic to their site where they had the item in stock.
All of these scenarios combined created a terrible customer experience, one that your brand-name will be connected to forever in the affected customers’ minds. It’s incredibly challenging to absolve yourself after the above situation plays out. This is why it’s so important to do something about it before it ever has a chance to happen at all.
What to do about it
The number one tip here is don’t wait until it’s too late. Shop now, implement as soon as possible and rest assured knowing that your brand, job, and customers are protected.
Bot Mitigation isn’t a customer experience buzzword, but it should be; one gap in your cybersecurity roadmap could leave you regretting that you didn’t explore your options sooner. When you are ready to shop for a bot management solution, check out our guide on how to shop for the right platform for your business, here.
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