Large-scale disasters lead to long-term change and the global C19 pandemic will be no exception. It has already forced the biggest players in finance, healthcare, airlines, retailing, telecom and their business process outsourcers to migrate tens of thousands of customer care agents from formal contact centers to home-office digs.
This diaspora coincides with measurable increased demand and activity on the so-called “voice channel.” Contact center managers report seeing as much as 50% increase in call volumes as customers sort out changes in travel plans, discuss revising payment, change package delivery instructions or simply seek answers about issues that are near-and-dear to their daily lives.
Calls are longer, more emotional and involve more personal info than the previous norm. In the age of remote agents, they are also more susceptible to fraud.
What contact center operations personnel and IT administrators see as a challenge, criminals and fraudsters see as a windfall. Within the first week that the World Health Organization declared a global pandemic, there was a 23% increase in e-commerce transactions around the world. A recent poll of more than 1000 Americans (18 and over) conducted by the Global Fraud & Identity Solutions group at TransUnion, showed that one-in-five had been targeted by online fraud related to COVID. The finding corresponded with a measured 347% uptick in “account takeover” and 391% increase in shipping fraud attempts, comparing 2019 results to 2018.
Distance Exposes New “Fraud Surfaces” and Authentication Requirements
TransUnion refers to this malign activity as “online fraud,” but that term is an obsolete concept. “Online commerce” is more accurately “digital commerce” and a single transaction takes place over many channels, including email, messaging platforms, SMS/text and, most importantly, calls to contact centers. Each one of these is a “fraud surface.” The chaos caused by transforming contact center agents to remote workers exposed, yet again, that their spirit of service and desire to please make them a weak point in the security fabric that companies so carefully assemble.
Outside the watchful eyes of contact center managers, agents do not always follow defined procedures, especially around customer authentication and protection of personal data. They are professional “helpers” by nature. Unsupervised, many speed customers through knowledge-based authentication processes, to shorten the time it takes to get to the core tasks of resolving a customer’s problem.
The harm done by contact center-based human engineering is compounded by the closing of retail stores, bank branches and other brick-and-mortar establishments. Instead of visiting a store and loading the trunk with groceries, shoppers now enter their delivery address and payment info online. The process of opening a new bank account used to involve showing up at a branch with sufficient personal documentation. Now it can be accomplished with a smartphone. As these face-to-face encounters replaced by online forms and processes the vulnerability to fraud becomes obvious.
Lifting the Authentication Burden from Remote Agents
With so much personal information online and remote agents on the line, the simplest way to keep the digital security surfaces strong is to take responsibility for authentication away from contact center agents. Voice biometrics provide a strong method for caller authentication. Rather than requiring an agent to ask challenge questions, the technology looks for a strong match between the caller’s voice and a stored voiceprint. When combined with other characteristics of the call, far beyond Automated Number Identification (ANI) which can be spoofed, a trusted link can be established and the agent and caller can get down to business.
Beyond strong authentication, voice biometrics can be integrated into solutions sets, like NICE’s RTA Suite which combine predictive analytics with rule-based systems to recognize a likely fraudster before routing to an agent. Another set of functions that can significantly shrink the “fraud surface” involve using tools to build a “Black List” of known fraudsters based on their voice and other characteristics of the call. Stopping untrustworthy people from engaging with customer care agents is the first line of defense and we have a chance to integrate these technologies and practices across all remote contact center operations.
I expect the positive impact of this approach will far outlive Covid-19. It’s the silver lining in the current stormclouds.
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