This is a question that has puzzled me for some time. While I believe we all agree that authenticating inbound customer phone calls is the top priority for every bank’s fraud team, at what cost are we willing to do this? Our customers? Our business revenue? That’s exactly what financial institutions are doing if they’re bombarding their customers with a bunch of security questions instead of servicing them at the onset of each call.

The precious seconds after a call is answered, which we like to call the “Golden Minute”, is the most important seconds a bank has in establishing a reputation of providing superior customer service and building a stronger bank-customer relationship.

While regulatory requirements such as “Know Your Customer” (KYC) continue to lengthen the time between when a call is answered and when a call center agent actually starts providing quality customer service, these lost seconds may very well be costing banks money and jeopardizing their best customers without them even knowing it.

Today, it’s no longer good enough just to keep fraud in check. It has to be contained without damaging the larger, broader relationship between the financial institution and customer, or the bank’s reputation.

Telephone banking security questions that are designed to validate the identity of the person calling a bank’s call center are delaying and negatively impacting quality customer service. The good work fraud teams are doing to secure the telephone channel is being undermined by a drawn-out, unpleasant interrogation process. The customer’s goodwill is getting lost as call center agents grill callers with a number of personal questions before they address the issues their customers initially called about. In my opinion, knowledge-based authentication (KBA) processes are wasting time and money, and are detrimental to any customer’s trust and goodwill.

This leads me to the question, as a bank, what if you could automatically validate your customers before the call is answered? How valuable would that be to your financial institution if you could eliminate the need to inundate customers with security questions and address their needs within seconds of answering the call?

Reducing authentication allows banks to take advantage of the critical first minute of a call. This presents the highest likelihood of positive engagement to build trust, improve customer service, and sell additional products and services. This is why I wonder why most banks continue to give up these precious seconds interrogating customers with questions that sour relations.

The TrustID^® Telephone Firewall^TM solution simplifies the authentication process by validating the call before it is answered. In other words, telephone authentication is performed without the customer or criminal knowing it. This is something no other available solution on the market can provide.

By using the telephone channel to service your customers, not break their trust through highly intrusive, time-killing interrogation, banks and financial institutions can show their customers immediate respect, create new revenue opportunities, and establish a more trusted relationship that is essential to retaining good customers.