After enduring the audio tune and typing in every number on the keypad, you are finally connected to Customer Support – breath easy. Well, not yet. Instead of getting to the point straight away, you will be subjected to a barrage of security questions to prove your identity. It would seem like every customer is treated as a potential intruder until proven otherwise. The customer support phenomenon is hated by many, and for good reasons. The necessary balance between security and good customer experience is heavily tilted towards the former and often times the experience leaves customers unwelcoming, bitter and exhausted.
Now, there was a buzz when a few notable Banks rolled out Voice Biometrics to identify the caller within 30 seconds into the call. And it was a fantastic idea as it worked without any additional biometric hardware – given that all phones (mobile and landline) had a microphone. So much so that we rolled out our own Speaker Recognition solution. However, we felt that it still wasn’t the answer: the registrations were long, voice samples were weak in a noisy environment and it took a minute or so before the customer was identified. And in most failed cases, the representatives had to fall back to the traditional knowledge based passwords and security questions to authenticate the customer. We felt we could do better.
So we attempted to solve this through our face biometrics technology (as part of our multi-factor authentication solution – again on the same principle of using existing mobile hardware). This is how it works: Alice wants to talk to a customer support representative about a transaction that she couldn’t recognize in her statement. She simply taps the “Connect to Customer Support” button within the Bank’s mobile app. Now assuming that Alice has already registered for this service, the App directs her to take a selfie which is authenticated against her enrolled faceprint in a couple of seconds. And when the call connects, Alice’s details are pulled up in front of the Customer Support representative with a message that Alice has already been authenticated. The representative simply proceeds to help Alice. Shouldn’t this be the case for anyone calling Customer Support for help: simple, welcoming and secure? Isn’t it time to change this disaster into an opportunity?
About FRS Labs: From preventing fraud to verifying identity, we help organisations onboard and retain good customers. Our patent pending solutions can be quickly integrated into existing web and mobile applications.
