Safeguard Your Call Centre with Multi-Layers of Security

Can you believe it’s been five years since Apple first introduced Siri? The time has flown by. Since then we’ve seen the technology grow in popularity, with the likes of Amazon and Microsoft launching competitors.

This has played a part in high-profile technology investor Mary Meeker dedicating a chunk of her annual report on the State of the Internet to the lift-off of the voice interface. Voice UI may have been around for decades but the improved accuracy of the technology has raised its profile and increased consumer usage. In 1970, machines could recognise words with just 10 percent accuracy. In 2010, it grew to 70 percent accuracy. In 2016, it jumped to 90 percent.

As accuracy and consumer confidence around it grows, it will naturally progress to a means of authentication for businesses, especially in the call centre. Not a moment too soon – contact centres are under renewed attack as increasingly effective controls in the online channel drive attackers to the phone.

Pindrop’s recent State of Fraud report revealed that 1 in 700 calls to contact centres is fraudulent, costing them £0.51 per call. In addition, fraudulent calls cause a significant loss to productivity and time by forcing call centres to screen every single caller.

The financial services sector is one area where new security measures are being considered to help safeguard bank accounts. This is essential, as a separate Pindrop survey of 1,000 consumers revealed that over half of respondents felt that no bank was fully secure. A further 59 percent said they would leave their bank if they thought another one was more secure.

One such advanced authentication method is voice biometrics, where characteristics of a speaker’s voice are used to authenticate him or her. Voice biometrics is focused on speech verification, which means confirming the claimed identity of a speaker from his or her voice. In other words, a caller claims to be someone, and the technology then matches the voice to an existing voiceprint.

Voice authentication is attractive for several reasons. A positive voiceprint can verify a customer, saving time and providing a higher level of security than knowledge-based authentication (KBA). And a negative voiceprint can be used to “blacklist” callers, alerting on them or blocking them when they call.

But, when introducing new technologies, it is essential that all angles are covered. If there are not multiple layers of security covering all channels, from face-to-face, to online, to the telephone, fraudsters are able to manipulate particular points of exposure. For instance, biometrics is one way to solve the credential recovery issue, but it cannot detect fraud on its own.

It does help to identify true customers, but fraudsters have many techniques which help them bypass this technology. Distortive or synthesised noises, for example, can alter the sound of a voice, making it hard to verify and accurately define the user as fraudulent. In these situations, banks must revert to traditional KBA questions, which may have been socially engineered or obtained through other data breaches.

Technology like Phoneprintin is a great example of multi-factor authentication. It identifies specific components about each call, such as the location a call is coming from, the device, whether it’s a mobile or landline and whether the phone has been used to call the company before. Combined, this can aid in detecting fraudulent activity before it becomes an issue.

So while voice UI continues will be a key piece in the authentication puzzle, businesses cannot look to voice as a direct and sole replacement for authentication. No matter how good the voice UI is today, and how comfortable consumers are with the technology due to the increased use of consumer programs like Siri, it is still always better to have multiple factors.

For more information about Pindrop, please visit their website.