voice biometrics

Hi Neil,

I believe Voice Biometrics do have a big part to play in the call centre and will come to the fore in the next couple of years.

In terms of customer experience, as with everything it all depends on the delivery and quality of the technology. Unreliable technology will result in a bad customer experience.

However if it is deployed in the right way and is reliable it will be a valuable tool in shortening call time thus increasing agent's capacity and can take away the (sometimes) laborious task of ID and V especially in banking, financial environments.

Chris.

Hi Neil,

We have been involved with voice biometric trials in the UK from as long ago as 2003. The technology has been around for a long time and there have been a number of deployments around the globe.

Prior to the recent downturn in the economy a number of institutions here in the UK were seriously evaluating the technology for fraud reduction and reducing agent handle time on the telephony channel. The downturn had a negative impact on a number of projects some of which were very close to going beyond initial customer trials and the technology definitely has a future in the contact centre.

The technology has been proved to work but organisations need to think through the processes for initial customer enrolment and then on-going ID&V very carefully so they don’t alienate their customers. Organisations should trial a number of approaches with staff and customer groups prior to full roll-out.

It’s also worth considering that the proliferation of smart phones and the obvious fit of using voice biometrics in conjunction with mobile applications for multimodal and multi-factor ID&V will drive up-take of the technology in the near future, particularly for processes such as banking transactions.

Further down the line companies will start to consider the possibilities for using the technology (depending on legalities) to capture a voice based customer ‘signature’ as proof of contract sign-off (for purchasing financial products for example) and this could deliver further and large scale operational cost savings for large organisations as well as fraud reduction.

I'd be happy to give more information on our experiences if you would like to get in touch. I'm consious of this site's 'no sales' policy so please ask the administrator for my contact details to put us in touchor drop me a line through the enquires section of our website .

Regards

Darren Mills