Customer Authentication and Fraud Detection: The Contact Center’s Looming Challenges

Ken Landoline

Summary Bullets:

• The costs of compromised security in the customer care environment are high to both the enterprise and the customer, and the occurrences of security breaches continue to grow briskly.
• Although not widely used technologies today, the combination of voice biometrics and predictive analytics has great potential to enhance fraud deterrence.

The methods of customer identification and verification used in contact centers today take too much time and are a major source of customer irritation. Agents’ questions inquiring about personal identification numbers (PINs) or asking pre-arranged security questions, such as “What is your father’s middle name?”, have outgrown their usefulness and are often easily circumvented by fraudsters seeking illegal access to customer accounts and private corporate information. High on the list of technologies destined to replace these traditional techniques are voice biometrics coupled with sophisticated predictive analytics.