By Wynand Smit is CEO at INOVO

Confidentiality is a non-negotiable when it comes to protecting the privacy of customers. The trouble is, companies may find themselves at the mercy of unscrupulous fraudsters as a result of data breaches. If the customers’ private information is exposed, the customer and company can lose financially, and even worse, the company’s reputation (and bottom line) can take a serious knock. It’s imperative to have watertight security solutions in place to combat fraud.

In financial services, the most frequent point of contact between the business and customer is from the contact centre. Traditionally those contact centres have relied on security questions as a means of industry compliance in positive identification, but this method is vulnerable: fraudsters can pretend to be the customer and even use the security process to learn more about that customer through unwitting agents. Agents themselves may also potentially exploit loopholes in security question systems to commit fraud. Voice authentication, however, closes those (and other) loopholes down.

Voice authentication works by recording the voice of the customer either in response to prompts or passively while the customer is on a voice call with the contact centre. This recording is converted into a sophisticated digital voiceprint unique to that customer and automatically compared with a database of known fraudsters.

Three benefits

This method of identity verification is far more secure and less invasive than older forms of authentication and has added benefits for company and customers alike.

1. Time saved

According to various studies, voice authentication may cut the identification process by as much as 70%, especially since it can remove the security questions from the equation. Since the biggest expenditure of a contact centre is on the time spent on calls, shortened call time translates to not only efficiency and productivity, but profitability, too.

2. Reduced customer frustration

There’s nothing worse than being a customer and having to repeat information during one or repeated calls. By the time you’ve managed to remember the name of your first pet, your mother’s maiden name and your landline number just to get access to an agent, you’ve passed three pain points and the agent is going to have to work twice as hard to keep you calm. Being able to get right down to business means you can keep a clear head and deal solely with the issue at hand.

3. Safe data

The technology involved safeguards your information by converting your voice into a digital voiceprint that works on speech patterns to a degree undetectable by the human ear. The software is incredibly advanced and also protects the customer against potential in-house agent fraud, since the agent’s voice will also be on record, cutting off the rogue agent’s ability to access security loopholes.

Voiceprints are rapidly being adopted as the go-to security solution for contact-centre based institutions, providing peace of mind to customers and companies alike.

Wynand Smit is CEO at INOVO, a company that specialises in contact centre optimisation.