Pain-Free Authentication Should Be a Strategic Priority

Brett Beranek at Nuance shares insights on why pain-free authentication should be a strategic priority for your contact centre.

If you’re managing a contact centre for an FSI, you’ll know that agents do their best work when they’re able to focus on the customer’s needs. And that in a lot of cases, ID&V—while essential—is a stress that they could really do without.

But it’s easy to underestimate just how damaging knowledge-based authentication processes are—not just to your agents’ morale and service levels, but to a contact centre’s efficiency and operating costs.

Customer Authentication: The Burden on Your Agents

Knowledge-based authentication (KBA) processes demand that contact centre agents play the interrogator, judge and jury.

They have to ask the customer for a password, PIN, or memorable answer. They have to look out for suspicious behaviour. They have to decide whether to flag fraudulent intent. And if they fail to spot a criminal they have to deal with the consequences.

All of this a recipe of anxious, stressed agents, and low staff morale.

Customer Authentication: The Impact on Your Contact Centre

Asking security questions takes time—for some organisations, between two and seven minutes per conversation. That’s a huge amount of your workforce’s day spent checking who people are, rather than actually addressing their needs.

But that’s just the tip of the inefficiency-berg. When agent morale is low, agent churn tends to be high—leaving you with increased recruitment and training costs, and a less experienced workforce.

This can, in turn, have a direct, measurable impact on customer experience; a recent Nemertes study found companies that keep agent turnover below 15% see a 26% improvement in customer ratings.

Simply put? When authentication is painful for your agents, it’s painful for your contact centre as a whole. What’s more, if you lead the charge to modernise your ID&V processes, you’re likely to have support from right across your business.

You’re Not the Only One Affected by Painful Authentication

Traditional, knowledge-based authentication processes are also a headache for CX and fraud prevention leaders.

Just as contact centre agents don’t enjoy feeling like interrogators, honest customers don’t enjoy being made to feel like suspects. The real criminals, meanwhile, are increasingly able to buy or crack customer passwords—which, as you might imagine, is a growing problem for many fraud prevention teams.

Look at the benefits you could gain by switching to a simpler, more secure authentication process, based on voice biometrics.

Author: Guest Author