Contact centres have become not only the primary point of contact between organisations and customers, but also the gateway to a wealth of personal information about each customer's identity.
So said Simon Cranswick, Dimension Data's GM for interactive solutions (Western Cape), last week at the Customer Interact Forum in George. According to Cranswick, this makes contact centres lucrative targets for fraudsters, hackers and other security threats, particularly those that use identity theft.
He revealed that agents can easily steal important data through the use of state-of-the-art ear technology which is fundamental in covert communications.
“This extra-small Bluetooth earpiece permits you to get real-time information or communications without being noticed,” he noted.
According to Cranswick, the contact centre is also exposed in regards to screen recordings, voice recordings, tone recognition and recording as well as on customer database. He revealed that agents can easily extract this information. He then urged the contact centres to make use of white boards (not pen and paper) as well as installing CCTV cameras, among other measures, to mitigate these limitations.
He also suggested that voice biometrics can be a key differentiator to the contact centre security since a lot of business is done using voice, adding that in the long-run, the business will get a return on investment from voice biometrics.
“Voice biometrics in contact centres also reduces call costs. The average time of manual verification is 20 seconds to 40 seconds, so there is R2.50 to R3.00 saved per call using voice biometrics.”
According to Cranswick, the cost of implementing voice biometrics differs with the scale of the project. “If a contact centre has many clients using the facility to authenticate their credentials, then there will be a higher cost of biometrics. However, the price also goes down with fewer customers,” he explained.
He noted the cost of implementing voice biometrics ranges from R4 million to R5 million for bigger contact centres. Furthermore, he claims most of the businesses that deploy the technology get return on investment within a year.
Besides enhancing security, Cranswick pointed out that voice biometrics improves customer experience, as it eliminates the need to answer many and often annoying questions. He added that the system increases efficiency as it gives room to less agent talk time.
He also noted that voice biometrics makes a clear demarcation between identification and verification.
“Identification is confirming a unique identifier of the real speaker, for instance, ID or account number. On the other hand, verification is testing whether you are who you say you are by comparing the speaker's voice print with the voice print enrolled for the owner of the identifier.”
“Speech recognition is understanding what you are saying and voice biometrics verifies whether you are who you say you are. It is the technology used for speaker verification,” he added.
He also explained that speaker verification is more than an enhancement to self-service applications.
“It is an extension of an organisation's security policies. Speaker verification becomes the necessary authentication process to front every security-conscious conversation or self-service transaction.”
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