The bank had struggled to find an easy way to authenticate customer calls coming into their contact center. Handling over 200,000 voice calls per month, the bank needed the ability to authenticate callers in a fast, secure, and customer-friendly manner. Prior to engaging Sutherland, calls were manually authenticated via a series of calls put to the caller by an agent. Customers were growing increasingly frustrated with the process after multiple failed attempts at answering questions and providing a PIN before they were finally able to pass through the authentication stage to the service point in a call flow. Additionally, the manual system increased the risk of fraud and drove up handling costs for the bank.
Sutherland implemented voice biometrics designed to improve the customer’s experience with the contact center. Our team integrated the biometrics with the bank’s contact center Interactive Voice Response (IVR) system, to offer the bank’s customers an easier and faster means of authentication. Customers can now subscribe to the voice biometrics with a common passphrase and are assigned a secret passphrase which matches individual characteristics in the person’s voice against the phrase in the enrolled voiceprint, thus authenticating their identity. In effect, callers use a vocal password which significantly improves the customer experience and decreases agent handling time. This was the first Arabic language implementation of voice biometrics in the world.
The bank made great strides as a result of implementing voice biometrics to authenticate their customer calls.
