The Internet is very good at anonymity. That historically has been one of its selling points, and the pathways to anonymity through the Internet are varied and many because of this very early design feature of the technology.
While there’s definitely a place for anonymous communications, the possibility for anonymity starts to become an issue as traditional phone networks transition to VoIP and IP-based delivery.
“On the public switched telephone network, when copper loops connected to black phones through carrier switches, they created the user connection to a voice network,” noted Tom Nolle (News - Alert) recently in a TechTarget blog post, president of CIMI Corp. “The identity of the user was fairly authoritative.”
However, today virtually all providers allow for the user to set the caller ID that is reported. This can lead to ID spoofing.
“Plus,” added Nolle, “there's no validation of the ID supplied. ‘Do not call’ lists and traditional Caller ID services are defeated by loss of authoritative identity.”
With identification in doubt, the sharing of sensitive data over the phone is challenged.
Call recording provides one way to help bridge the gap, both from an identity verification angle and especially from a liability perspective.
The use of call recording to ensure identity takes two primary paths. First, there is recording telephone interactions to capture identity challenge questions and their answers, which can help prove that identity has been established during the call. With sophisticated speech analytics, businesses that must ensure identity also can conceivably implement real-time monitoring solutions that could listen in on agent conversations and raise a red flag if identity verification is not established or established successfully.
Second, call recording can help with training agents to always establish identity and discover when there are attempts at subverting identification. Call recording is an ideal way to train staff, because agents can hear actual customer interactions instead of made-up scenarios.
It also is relatively easy to show agents how they can improve their performance by replaying previous customer interactions by the agent.
Taken together, these two uses for call recording can go a long way toward establishing and ensuring identity in the new landscape of semi-anonymous calling.
While it currently is hard to establish authoritative identity with VoIP calling, call recording can help bridge the gap.
Edited by Alisen Downey