Identity crisis
E-gamers dislike waiting for identity verification, and persuading them it’s beneficial could be a tough proposition, writes Barnaby Page
W
e’ve written before, in this column and in Casino International’s news pages, about the rapidity with which frustrating interfaces or poor
help systems repel people from an e-experience. Now comes yet another piece of research into the subject, this time focusing on consumers’ views of the time eaten up by identity verification. And the survey, by Experian and the International
Fraud Prevention Research Centre at Britain’s Nottingham Business School, found that gaming is the online application where a long wait is least acceptable.
Said Nick Mothershaw, Director of Identity and
Fraud at Experian: “The message for providers using older forms of identity verification and other security procedures is to make the checks faster and less onerous.” Fair enough. But it’s not easy to detect a clear pattern in the Experian findings that explains why acceptable wait times vary markedly among sectors.
Gaming was the application where consumers had
the least tolerance for a wait, losing their patience after three minutes; next came retail, at four minutes. Both these tend to involve relatively low-value transactions with rapid gratification (particularly if one presumes that some of the pleasure of shopping is in simply having bought the product, rather than physically receiving it, a moment which e-commerce postpones). At the bottom of the list, meanwhile, were three applications where consumers would wait twice as long, tolerating a six-minute delay: in-branch banking, insurance, and travel. Online banking came in close at five minutes. The delay before gratification on these is rather
mixed. Banking may be a matter of making a transfer that needs to be executed today, or of setting up a standing order that won’t take effect for a month. Insurance is something that, if you need it, you
probably want right away. Yet travel is usually booked weeks or months in advance. However, what they do have in common is that the
sums involved will often be a lot more than those staked in a session by a casual gamer. Also worth a five-minute wait for identity
verification were, the polled consumers reported, dealings with telecommunications and transport companies, and much the same comments apply to these as to the six-minute bunch. The delays before gratification are mixed – for example, topping up a pay-as-you-go phone is an instant requirement, buying a new handset is not. But again, the amount of money involved may be much more than the impatient gamer plans to spend. So, it seems that the raw minutes figure for the
delay which identity checking introduces before the gratification of the transaction may not be the most important factor. Instead, is it that consumers are happy to put up with a level of identity checking that they feel is proportionate to the value of the transaction? Instead, is it that consumers are happy to put up
with a level of identity checking that they feel is proportionate to the value of the transaction? After all, waiting more than a few minutes to, say, place a £5 bet on a football match does instinctively seem disproportionate. And, further, is that because they erroneously believe that the transaction value is all that they are risking? If so, we could address this by considering the issue of waiting time another way. Of course we should try to minimise the “time cost” to the consumer while identity checks are performed, but we should also encourage them to look at an alternative scenario: the possible monetary cost if those checks are not performed. So the crucial thing to stress here, when explaining
why they can’t proceed immediately to the game, is that that monetary cost could be far greater than the transaction value if there weren’t identity-related safeguards in place (obviously, I’m not suggesting we
should phrase it in that rather abstract way). For example, if we didn’t perform thorough checks, it would be much easier for the bad guys to use stolen credit-card information on our e-gaming services. But, and it’s a big but: that’s a difficult benefit to
sell. It reminds me of a dilemma from medical ethics.
Given a certain amount of resource, it may be more cost-effective (in terms of lives saved per unit of resource) to cheaply immunise 25,000 people against flu than to give expensive courses of chemotherapy to ten cancer patients. (These figures are within the ballpark, but please don’t quote them as accurate.) Which should we do? Many people would balk at
expending the resource on the immunisations, even though it may seem the most rational policy; and one of their principal arguments will be that we don’t know for sure that any of the 25,000 will die without the immunisations, whereas we can be certain the cancer patients will die if they are not treated. Even if epidemiology makes us pretty confident that there will be more than ten flu deaths in an unimmunised population, we lack the technology to predict which individuals will be affected, so it’s still undeniable that the overwhelming majority of the vaccines have no medical benefit to their recipients! What this has to do with e-gaming (honest) is that
when we are trying to persuade the consumer to accept time-consuming identity checks, we are making an argument for immunisation; asking them to spend their time resource on a process that probably won’t benefit them personally, rather than on more immediately pressing issues. We cannot argue that if we don’t run the check, this particular individual will have their credit card or bank account compromised, because they almost certainly won’t. We can only hope they understand that if we didn’t run the checks on everybody, some people would (probably) be ill-affected. And that’s not going to be an easy message to communicate, is it?
86 JANUARY 2012
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