Introducing a Game-Changing Fraud + Authentication Strategy

This blog post was co-authored by Kathy Sobus (Senior Director, Customer Experience Strategy, ConvergeOne) and LumenVox.

Customer service is evolving swiftly, and so are customer expectations. Customers expect a personalized experience, but how do you accomplish that while at the same time protecting their identity—and reducing your fraud risk?

Technology advances prioritize convenience through services like touchless payments, mobile-to-mobile money movement, and one-click online purchases. Customers and companies alike are increasingly aware of the corresponding issue of security. Not a month goes by without multiple corporations being breached in some way. Oftentimes, the target is customer’s personal information. The cost of this is exorbitant not only to the customer ($5,000+), but also to the company, to the tune of millions of dollars.

Companies suffer from this everywhere throughout the organization. From a customer standpoint, confidence is shaken, as the customer no longer feels that the company can be trusted to handle sensitive information. From a marketing perspective, now we must deal with explaining how the customer can take steps to protect themselves. Companies don’t care to disclose the financial hit that they take, though it is surely excessive. Technically speaking, as well, the company now must make changes to its security protocols to prevent this from happening again.

What’s rarely known is that over 70% of fraud begins in social engineering and ends up in the contact center. As a result, authentication has become paramount.

Traditional Authentication

Many organizations feel as though they’re doing a good job with this. When a customer first has a relationship with the institution, they answer a series of questions that are housed in that institution’s database. Then, when they contact the organization, a representative will ask 3-5 of those questions. Once the customer answers them “correctly,” they can then move the conversation to sharing why they called. This process is stressful for both the customer and the agent. It is also time consuming, costing about 30-45 seconds per call—and you know what they say. Time is money.

A Game-Changing Fraud + Satisfaction Strategy

Voice biometrics reduce fraud. To adequately estimate the benefit, an organization must first calculate how much fraud exists in a contact center. This is difficult, as fraudsters are evasive. The good ones get away with fraud undetected.

Let’s make some general estimations: Based on data gathered from many financial institutions, it’s safe to assume that fraudsters’ phone calls make up approximately 0.08% of the total call volume. To keep the numbers conservative, we will assume an average fraud event costs an organization $500. For a contact center getting 10,000 calls per day, this amounts to 8 fraud calls per day, each at $500. That equates to a fraud loss of approximately $1,460,000 annually.

But this is just the tip of the iceberg. Loss in revenue due to a breach, loss in marketing, and technology improvements can really add up. A conservative estimate uses a fraud detection rate of 35%, which means the addition of voice biometrics can reduce fraud losses by about $511,000 per year.

Voice biometrics also streamline conversations. When it comes to contact center authentication, callers overwhelmingly prefer voice biometrics to knowledge-based security questions. Depending on the survey, the numbers suggest that 80-90% of callers prefer to be authenticated using voice biometrics over traditional knowledge-based authentication. Why? They don’t need to be interrogated. Instead, they can authenticate with the sound of their own voice. The beauty of voice biometrics is that an IVR is not necessary, nor is it necessary to enroll customers (though that option is always available).

Oh, and did we mention that the conversation is now much shorter? You can realize savings, here as well. We’ll cover that later.

Customer expectations are driving companies to change the way they’re providing customer service.
It is critical to differentiate your organization, especially now with everyone at home. Fraud prevention helps you achieve this in your company. A “know me, help me, protect me” mantra—letting customers know you are prioritizing their convenience and security—means your business is one step ahead in a world that is playing catch up.

PROTECT YOUR BUSINESS AND YOUR CUSTOMERS

ConvergeOne Biometric Authentication Services combine the use of voice, thumb print, facial recognition and more to identify and stop criminal activity, protect the company and the customers, and reduce costs.