Voice Biometrics Technology Can Alleviate More than One Customer Pet Peeve

Despite the proliferation of channels through which customers can contact a company, there is one thing that hasn’t changed: customers still like speaking to a human. According to Opus Research, 80 percent of all callers to contact centers prefer to go straight to a live agent. Traditionally, the IVR is considered a bit of a barrier by customers: in an attempt to route the call to the correct agents, it delays the customer getting his or her business taken care of. A poorly designed IVR with too many branches on the menu tree can leave a customer thinking the company simply doesn’t want to speak with its customers.

While many companies have taken steps to implement better IVR solutions and other routing techniques to minimize waiting time and transfers, recent years have brought customers another type of delay: authentication procedures to protect the customer’s data.

According to a recent blog post by NICE Systems’ (News - Alert) Jade Kahn, customers are becoming more and more frustrated with the time and effort spent just to address their service requests. Service providers are requiring more sophisticated passwords, more complex verification questions, and more tokens and dongles to carry around. Despite all this, it may not be enough.

“Unfortunately, all of these efforts are still being circumvented by increasingly determined fraudsters who are targeting the phone channel,” writes Kahn. “And, as a result, companies are likely to further increase the number of hoops and hurdles that legitimate customers have to pass going forward. All this begs the $200-billion question: is there a way to protect the contact center while reducing the customer burden?”

There is, say many in the authentication industry: the human voice. While customers may not be happy to remember a series of login information and passwords, security questions and PIN numbers, they are already using their most important security tool in their telephone call to the contact center: their voice.

It’s not only about the customer: eliminating barriers to beginning the call also helps the contact center, according to NICE. Although it may only take a few seconds per call, customer authentication can comprise more than 25 percent of average handle time. When multiplied across millions of calls a year, this process constitutes significant operational cost for the contact center, and might also harm customer experience.

Voice biometrics could serve dual purposes in the contact center: for starters, it could help identify who the customer is without the need for him or her to route through an IVR or input account numbers. Secondly, while it routes the customer, it could simultaneously authenticate him or her, establishing the caller’s identity beyond a doubt and allowing the agent to go almost directly to the point of the call: helping the customer with the issue he or she called about in the first place.