Shifting Call Center Authentication From Agents to a System

Financial institutions, including credit unions, walk a tightrope, balancing the need for quick, responsive customer service with enhanced security demands, according to TRUSTID’s 2018 State of Call Center Security Survey.

TRUSTID’s survey on contact center authentication revealed that contact center administrators no longer want their staff serving as CSI agents, using knowledge-based authentication as the de facto verification method, even though 40% of respondents doubt KBA’s accuracy.

The Lake Oswego, Ore.-based caller authentication firm indicated data breaches continue to flood the dark web with consumers’ personal information. That may be why one-third of contact center leaders expressed dissatisfaction with their current authentication approach (and 50% of those in financial services).

Only 10% of all respondents felt very confident in KBA’s ability to authenticate callers accurately. Thirty-eight percent of respondents expressed little to no confidence. More than half of financial services respondents revealed they lacked confidence in KBA. “This is especially distressing, given the essential role of authentication in serving callers at financial institutions’ contact centers and keeping out fraudsters,” the report said.

“The goal of the survey was to help both us and the industry understand better what our attitudes toward current authentication practices, as well as awareness and interest in new technologies and what are the requirements of new technologies being considered,” Lance Hood, chief marketing officer at TRUSTID, said.

The contact center professionals surveyed, most of whom work in either customer experience or operations, represented industries with mature authentication postures: Financial services, ecommerce and telecommunications. Hood said, “Most of the respondents were from financial services [organizations] like credit unions, and the reason is that that’s a market segment for which authentication is a critical function.”

The survey found many are ready to move in a new direction. While more than half of the respondents are now familiar with new authentication technologies such as pre-answer call analysis and voice biometrics, these new approaches operate in less than 20% of the contact centers represented.

Hood noted respondents expect a lot from the alternatives. At the top of the list is enrolling customers quickly and easily. The market also wants to make life easier for agents. Ninety-two percent of respondents want new technologies to reduce agent time spent on authentication. Some 80% want authentication completed before the call is answered or during the interactive voice response portion.

“We asked a lot about what they wanted and things that bubbled to the top of the list is a technology that will be adopted and used by the consumers and technology that does authentication without involving agents,” Hood noted.

In regard to caller enrollment, call center leaders also prefer an authentication method that does not use any personally identifiable information and can instantly process 100% of calls upon activation.

Patrick Cox, CEO of TRUSTID, said pre-answer caller authentication is the only method currently on the market meeting all these requirements. “What we do is we make sure that the phone call coming into the credit union is actually coming from within the four walls of the client’s home or from the cell phone registered to the user. So, we know that phone is engaged in calling that credit union right at that very second.”

The report said agent-based authentication often represented 20% of the cost and duration of a call. This is consistent with the desire for alternate technologies to reduce agent time on authentication, reduce overall call times and improve agent job satisfaction.

The TRUSTID spokespeople explained voice biometrics required a sample of the caller’s voice, which is impossible to collect before answering the call and difficult to complete in an IVR setting. The pre-answer call analysis method completes an authentication step without the caller’s awareness, requires no user enrollment and does not add any time to the call’s duration.

“The call center can really eliminate or really reduce the questioning process and get right to servicing their customers. We’re done before the IVR even says ‘Hello,’” Cox said. “The system does the heavy lifting. They can have the call duration dropped by a third or a half because they will not have to ask all those questions.”