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November 17, 2016 • 3 minute read

Advantages of Voice Biometrics Solutions

As security concerns and incidents continue to grow across businesses in most industries, the ability to provide convenient and secure authentication for customer service applications is becoming a requirement for modern security standards. For this reason, voice biometrics solutions are increasingly being implemented. By verifying a customer’s identity using the unique characteristics of each human voice, voice biometrics eliminate the need for passwords and PINs, and are much less susceptible to fraud. This is particularly important for those industries that experience a high volume of repeat callers, as approximately 30-50% of all fraud incidents are initiated with a phone call. The Financial Services and Banking industries reported more than one million incidents of financial fraud in the first half of 2016 — or 1 incident every 15 seconds — a 53 percent increase over the same period last year. Industries with similar risk include telecommunications, government, healthcare, insurance and digital commerce.

Could your business stand to take advantage of voice biometrics solutions? Here are 3 unique pros of voice biometrics:

1. Increased Security, Decreased Fraud

The growing number of fraud attacks across industries has increased the need for strong, multi-factor authentication. Unlike PINs and security questions, which can be more easily compromised, voice biometrics ensures that the person calling is indeed who they say they are. Research has found that 10-25% of users – almost all of whom are legitimate – fail to answer security questions correctly when calling in. By reducing the risk of social engineering that often occurs with agents, voice biometrics is also much less susceptible to fraud, making it an ideal method for validating callers in your contact center.

2. Improved Customer Experience

A more commonly overlooked advantage of voice biometric solutions is that they actually hold the potential to significantly improve customer experiences. With voice biometrics products, callers no longer need to provide passcodes or PINs or provide answers to challenge questions in order to verify their identity. This makes voice biometrics ideal for various omnichannel and multichannel deployments, because once a customer is enrolled, his or her voiceprint can be leveraged across all of your company’s support channels. This seamless experience not only makes the process easier and more efficient for your customer, but it also leads to improved CSAT, NPS, and Customer Effort Scores, as highlighted by recent Forrester research. In fact, it has been found that voice biometrics can reduce the time it takes to verify a caller’s identity from anywhere from 10 seconds to several minutes, depending on the reason for the call. This advantage offers the ability to dramatically improve not only call personalization, but also customer experiences.

3. Reduced Costs

Research has found that voice biometrics solutions can save millions of dollars in agent time by reducing the steps and time involved in the verification process by as much as 70-80%. In addition, companies are – on average –  able to reduce Average Handle Time by 30+ seconds per call when using voice biometrics for authentication. This translates not only to increased efficiency in your security process, but also tremendous cost savings associated with the decreased time your agents need to spend authenticating customers.

At Interactions, our Voice Biometrics solution is seamlessly integrated with our Intelligent Virtual Assistant solution. Since voiceprints are collected as part of normal conversation and securely encrypted and stored, this removes the need for lengthy and cumbersome enrollments and eliminates the major upfront investments inherent with traditional voice biometrics solutions.

For more information about Interactions Voice Biometrics Virtual Assistant solution, visit our page.

Want to learn more? Let’s talk.