Your Call Center Operation is Trending in the Wrong Direction. What Are You Doing About it?

You’ve ordered something online. Upon receiving the confirmation email, you realize that your address is wrong. So you go to the company’s website and scour their FAQs but are still unable to find a solution. According to a study done by OnePoll on behalf of Twilio Flex, 66% of people delay reaching out to customer service for an average time of sixteen days. Once you muster up the courage to call, most people spend over thirty minutes listening to annoying hold music or, even worse— attempting to speak to an automated bot. So, it’s no surprise that people would go to great lengths not to contact customer service. A second survey component had respondents list uncomfortable things they would rather do instead of call customer service; 22% said they would rather spend the night in jail!

How Secure Are Your Call Center Authentication Questions?

Even once you get through to customer service, the call center authentication questions the agent asks could be answered by anyone who knows the answer. A fraudster generally knows the KBAs- Knowledge-Based Authentication answers- more than half of the time. There is so much call center fraud that 1 in 20 calls for password changes are fraudulent. And this is an increase of 70% in the last year. 

Everything Has a Price

Unfortunately, fraudsters can buy most of your personal data on the Dark Web. Data ends up on the dark web in several ways, through data breaches, using non-secure public Wi-Fi, and phishing. Data breaches occur when attackers hack into a company’s database and steal their customers’ personal information. Often, they will target large companies, and if successful, the breach can affect millions of people. Using non-secure public Wi-Fi is another way hackers can access your data. A hacker can intercept data moving between two participants (you to your bank), create fake Wi-Fi networks, or watch you put login information to different websites from afar. The most common cyber attack, which affected 83% of companies in 2021 alone, phishing, uses impersonation to trick you into entering personal data into a fake system. Some examples of phishing include receiving emails that look like they are from Google, your bank, or Amazon asking you to verify login details. Others include phone calls that involve anything from your car’s warranty expiring to your social security number having been breached. Phishing is meant to make you panic and send money or valuable data to scammers. This data is then sold on the dark web, allowing all kinds of people with malicious intent to buy it. Much of it ends up perpetuating call center fraud.

A Very Costly Call

For the company itself, call center authentication is expensive; it costs $0.22 more to authenticate a customer than it did three years ago. Even more shocking, it costs $70 for a single over-the-phone password reset. 

Unnecessary Inefficiency  

So if it’s not productive for the company and the customer, is it possible to shorten customer service calls while more securely authenticating a customer?

Introducing the Anonybit Genie.

Avoiding Call Center Fraud: As Easy as Wishing From a Bottle

Instead of texting someone a five-digit code or asking for their mother’s maiden name, the customer service agent can send a link to a caller’s phone or email that directs them to authenticate using a selfie. Once the selfie is captured, Anonybit system compares it to the one on file, and the agent will receive an authentication response in 10 seconds or less. This efficiency separates Anonybit from its competition as it provides high-speed call center authentication without compromising on security. 

Vetoing Just Voice Verification

Voice authentication seems easier and even more efficient than selfie authentication because it can be done as part of the natural call center interaction. However, voice verification has a number of limitations. First, voice is typically not captured as part of the account opening process and so the verification is using an after the fact sample. Second, there are considerable performance issues especially in loud environments or if the quality of the connection is poor. Additionally, in most cases, the voice recordings are stored in a centralized repository and generally require a specialist to validate a fraud incident. If the data is then breached and voice biometrics are compromised, it could lead to further identity theft.. Anonybit’s privacy-by-design selfie authentication process is more secure, as the biometrics are stored in anonymized bits, leaving no room for data to be stolen and used elsewhere. Even if one of the anonymized bits are compromised, the attacker will gain access to only one part out of many, leaving the stolen data effectively useless. 

The Genie’s Effect: Almost Better Than a Magic Carpet

Beyond combating call center fraud, the Anonybit Genie delivers immediate and tangible operational benefits to the contact center, leveraging persistent, privacy-enhancing biometrics for solid identity assurance. The Anonybit Genie replaces knowledge-based answers and one-time passwords with selfie authentication, leading to a response time of 10 seconds or less, 66%-86% shorter than the industry standard. This translates into faster AHTs and lower costs. This allows customer service agents to spend their time helping real customers, not fraudsters, leading to a more efficient use of their time and their employer’s money and resulting in higher levels of customer satisfaction. 

For more information about Anonybit’s call center authentication solution, click here.