What Can We Do to Keep Our Data Safe?

​Businesses and customers alike are victims of hackers.

The first suffer from brand and reputation damages as well as heavy costs.

For end customers, the consequences can be dramatic – a hack can expose them to much more than financial damages and impact their credit scores, their medical privacy and much more.

Yet, the flock of data breaches in recent years has only changed the conversation insofar as we don’t ask “if” an organization will be attacked but “when” it will be attacked.

This was the case with Saks​ ​recently, Forever 21​, and more, … And while we are growing more aware of the risks of sharing information online, very few of us have slowed down our virtual activities. Even Facebook already recovered from the Cambridge Analytics breach with its shares being back to their pre-controversy value.

In the contact center, security and compliance professionals have taken all the right steps to assure that their data and their customers’ information is safe and secured. In recent years, we have seen a shift where those concerns were becoming intimately tied with customer experience and customer success KPIs.

Let the good guys in and keep the bad guys out

With real-time authentication (RTA), NICE’s customers have been able to offer more secured services to their customers by letting the good guys in and keeping the bad guys out.

Take the Equifax​ scandal, for instance. With billions of sensitive data stolen, how can an organization be sure that the person calling is not a fraudster and that they are not perpetuating a theft in the name  of providing quick time to service?

Only with solutions like NICE RTA can you make sure that the person on the other end of the line is who they claim to be and that the service is not delayed. NICE RTA uses voice biometrics as well as other seamless authentication techniques in the background of each call, to assure you that the speaker is indeed the right person with no interruptions to providing the service. It ensures that the speaker is not a fraudster, thus prevents phishing, account takeover and other fraudulent activities typically targeting the contact center. Now that’s for the most visible part of the iceberg – protecting consumers while you are on a call with them.

The hidden battle

Underneath the water, there is an army of system engineers who fight to make sure that the data is safe. If this battle is not a bloody one, it is a sweaty one. To verify that data is properly encrypted and to make sure that no sensitive information is captured, IT teams need to manually process hundreds of interactions a day. To make their mission easier, NICE offers a Compliance Center with dedicated tools to automate the most redundant compliance activities: assuring that the data is properly encrypted – and if needed, re-encrypt it; locking interactions for playback, and centralizing all policy management activities in a dedicated portal. All regulatory challenges are addressed as part of this holistic solution, which has already been adopted by customers globally to ensure that their data is safe and to show proactivity to regulators.