Voice Print Technology Means Fast and Reliable Customer Authentication

Every time you read about a criminal successfully stealing someone else’s identity and impersonating a victim, you get to wondering: with all the bells and hoops I have to jump through today to get into my own accounts, how are criminals managing this?

Digital security today is more critical than ever, and this has led to most organizations upping the stakes when it comes to customer authentication. Before we can check our bank statements or other sensitive records, we must enter passwords and PINs, deal with tokens and answer security questions. Customers are also increasingly frustrated by the sideshow they are submitted to every time they interact with a company, either online or via the call center. By some estimates, today’s authentication process takes up to two minutes. It may not seem like much, but when you’re trying to check your savings balance before you have to rush out to pick your kids up from the bus, two minutes is a very long time.

Bloggers from the solutions marketing arm of NICE Systems (News - Alert) have likened the process to the Spanish Inquisition: ““The old Inquisition had its rack and its thumbscrews and its instruments of torture with iron teeth,” wrote NICE’s Elizabeth Moses and Jade Kahn.

So how do you keep your customers happy but at the same time ensure they are who they say they are when dealing with them? (Because nothing makes a customer unhappy faster than finding out their personal accounts have been breached.)

One way that companies see authentication going in the future involves voice biometrics. According to Opus Research, voice biometrics is part of the ideal authentication solution that “balances both ease of use and security concerns,” according to the NICE blog. Voice authentication works in real-time (meaning it’s fast). It’s also relatively fool-proof (you can steal someone else’s password, but you can’t steal their voice…not without a whole lot of effort, anyway).  It allows customers to authenticate themselves quickly and skip all the annoying PINS, user names, passwords and the pain of trying to recall the precise spelling of the first street they ever lived on.

From a call center perspective, voice authentication not only protects the business, but it allows agents to keep their average handle time (AHT) down. When combined with other automatic authentication methods, it’s quick and reliable. Fraud is on the rise in contact centers. Individuals who have stolen the identities of others will try and manipulate agents into allowing them to bypass many authentication processes.

NICE offers a solution that utilizes voice print matching for speaker identification that can cut fraud before it begins. The NICE Contact Center Fraud Prevention solution uses voice print technology to identify customers, but it does more than that: all interactions are cross-referenced with a suspicious watch list of known fraudsters and given a risk score. Those interactions identified as “high risk” create alerts and undergo further investigation via the NICE Actimize Enterprise Risk Case Manager.

It’s a way companies can protect themselves and their customers while keeping the high costs of wasted time for traditional authentication (not to mention customer patience) to a minimum.