Call Center Archive - TRUSTID | Automatic Caller Authentication

Archive for the ‘Call Center’ Category

Authenticating caller party numbers shouldn’t be a masquerade ball

Posted on: May 15th, 2013 by art 2 Comments

The challenge of spotting criminals over the telephone channel often plays out like a game of cat and mouse. Crooks use false information to mask their true identities. After spoofing their caller ID to make it look like someone else is calling, they try to convince call center agents they are genuine banking customers.

Armed with enough personally identifiable information (PII) to apply for credit, activate bank cards, transfer funds and defeat PII-based authentication solutions, many criminals continue to successfully socially engineer bank representatives by correctly answering the security questions required by more traditional knowledge-based authentication (KBA) tools.

From an authentication standpoint, the call center environment has somewhat turned into a masquerade ball of disguises, where it’s anybody’s guess as to who is who. The financial services industry can no longer operate within a guessing game environment anymore. Fielding more than 50 billion calls a year, call centers need to have the appropriate tools in place to quickly and accurately authenticate all inbound calls.

As criminals do everything they can to slip past PII-based authentication solutions, it’s more important than ever for financial institutions to deployed effective security measures to identify customers in real time.

Using a patent-pending telephone firewall that includes telephony databases, real-time network forensics and specialized analytics, the TRUSTID® Physical Caller Authentication tool authenticates the calling party number before the call center agent picks up. This allows banking institutions to prevent spoofed calls from being routed to bank representatives, and in doing so, call center agents don’t waste their time interrogating known high-risk calls. Instead, they spend more time servicing good customers and improving the overall customer experience.

With the volume of customer calls increasing every year, operational efficiency is becoming a key component in the authentication process. By invisibly identifying risky calls and not interrupting the customer service process with unnecessary telephone interrogations, TRUSTID helps banks unmask criminals before they’re allowed into the party.

The cost of bank fraud and operational inefficiency

Posted on: May 8th, 2013 by art No Comments

When we talk about call center authentication, we’re essentially talking about two things — accuracy and efficiency.

Sure, there are many tools that are designed to identify customers in their own way. But what differentiates one solution from another is the speed and accuracy that it takes to validate calls. In the end, authenticating customers over the telephone channel comes down to how quickly we can analyze risk, which is the indicator that helps banks agents determine whether or not the caller is who they say they are.

While caller ID spoofing can impact banks in many different ways, including bank fraud, the bank-customer relationship and damage to a corporate brand, the time takes to validate customers over the telephone channel can be just as important, and costly. Relying on traditional knowledge-based authentication (KBA) to verify customers over the telephone can also have a negative impact on banks due to the amount of time it takes to verify customers.

For financial institutions that depend on KBA to identify customers over the phone, here are a few things to consider:

First, there’s the cost of customer trust and goodwill. By this I mean disrupting the customer experience. For example, an authentication solution that require customers to first answer a bunch of challenge questions can be very disruptive to the process. Of course customers want to know they are being protected, but by taking too much of their valuable time to verify who they are before their needs are addressed can test the customer’s patience. Having a solution that automatically validates callers before the phone is picked up can eliminate unnecessary security questions that can impact the profitable bank-customer relationship.

The average call handling (ACH) time is important to every contact center. You can bet every call center manager knows their ACH time because it plays a critical role in their operating costs. The more bank call centers can lower their ACH time, the more money they can save on operations. This underscores the need to deploy fast, accurate solutions for validating callers.

Finally, without the ability to accurately identify callers, banking institutions are pretty much operating in the dark. What’s so problematic about this scenario is that authentication solutions that rely on personally identifiable information (PII) are essentially operating on blind faith, which puts both their customers and systems at risk. With personal information so accessible over the Internet today, PII-based authentication solutions should no longer be the basis for customer identification.

The bottom line is there are various costs that come with authenticating customers. Cost in the form of trust, cost in the form of labor and operational expenses, and cost in the form of fraud. All of this can weigh in the balance of how fast call centers can authenticate callers without disrupting the overall customer experience.

There will always be a cost for authenticating customers over any bank sales channel, including the call center. However, banks should not have to accept telephone fraud, lost customers and operational inefficiencies as the cost of doing business.

Contact centers taking a lead role in the overall banking experience

Posted on: May 1st, 2013 by art No Comments

Long are the days of waiting in long lines to cash checks or make routine bank deposits. In today’s multi-channel marketplace, the way customers want to bank is changing, and in turn, so are the ways financial institutions service customers.

For many of us, walking into our bank’s branch office is becoming a rare occurrence, anymore. More and more customers are banking remotely because of the ease, speed and convenience it has made on our busy lifestyles. Along with that, the primary role of bank contact centers is shifting from informational and troubleshooting centers to sales and purchase-related activities.

The recent article, “Talking Up Sales in the Contact Center,” addresses some key changes that are taking place in the banking environment, including:

Customers are making less branch visits, but still want a live conversation with a bank representative when opening accounts
Remote banking is maturing from a transactions service to a full shopping and banking experience in a multi-channel marketplace
Bank contact centers are playing a central role in customer acquisition and cross-selling
Higher averages sales conversion ratios are taking place in contact centers (2%) than walk-in branch traffic (typically around 1.5%)
Despite years of investments in branch selling, the best sales conversion ratios have only a fraction of the potential of the contact center

With callers typically setting aside 15 minutes for help, if the bank agent can address their needs and service them in the first few minutes, a customer will likely have time to listen to additional banking services that go beyond their initial needs. This is one example of how banks can improve customer satisfaction and their bottom line.

With progressive contact centers fast becoming the largest branch for banking, the article suggests banks need to “strengthen their sales strategies and back up their commitment with the appropriate investments in people, processes and technology.”

Another way many leading financial institutions are enhancing the banking experience through the telephone channel is through the TRUSTID® Physical Caller Authentication tool, which verifies the risk of the call pre-answer so when the banks agent picks up they can immediately begin serving the customer.

Unlike traditional knowledge-based authentication (KBA) tools that interrogate customers with a bunch of challenge questions during the first minute of the call, TRUSTID validates the risk of the call before it is answered to help banks take advantage of the “golden minute” of the phone conversation. These precious few seconds present the highest likelihood of positive engagement to immediately address the customer’s needs and use the time saved to sell additional products and services.

Too many financial institutions continue to lose the opportunity by relying on time-consuming security questions to validate callers. This outdated method uses up valuable resources, drives up call center costs, and is destroying the trust and goodwill of their customers, which ultimately impacts the bottom line.

Moving forward, every banks’ success will be determined by its ability to constantly change with the market and meet growing customer demands. The TRUSTID Physical Caller Authentication solution helps them get there by averting fraud without wasting valuable time and resources interrogating customers over the telephone channel. By deploying tools that keep each customer’s needs upfront and center, banks can better serve their customers, sell new services, drive down operating costs, and generate more revenue through customer loyalty.

Alternative authentication methods needed in today’s call center environment

Posted on: April 17th, 2013 by art 5 Comments

The need for alternative methods to identify customers over the telephone has been a long time coming. In my opinion, every day that a bank waits to add new authentication solutions into the mix is another day criminals can take advantage of defeatable security tools.

You see, crooks want financial institutions to continue to use things like security questions to identify customers. That’s because they’ve pretty much mastered the art of beating knowledge-based authentication solutions. When banks rely on personal information that, ideally, only the customer should know, they put themselves at a disadvantage because today’s digital world exposes more personal identifiable information (PII) than every before.

Combing the Internet, today’s thieves are able to collect enough information on an individual to correctly answer challenge questions and socially engineer bank call center agents into divulging sensitive financial data; enough data, in fact, to access other people’s bank accounts.

Even the FFIEC (Federal Financial Institutions Examination Council) recognizes that more information is needed to identify bank customers today. While the FFIEC authentication standards include “something you know” (password, PII) methods, they strongly recommend combining that with at least a second layer of authentication to improve the level of verification for identifying customers over the phone. That would come in the form of either “something you have” (telephone, ID card, security token) or “something you are” (fingerprint, DNA, retinal pattern) that takes separate approach to verify customers.

What differentiates the TRUSTID® Physical Caller Authentication tool from other solutions is it goes straight to the heart of the crime — the telephone — to proactively validate the Caller ID and ANI as the phone rings. By identifying the physical location of the phone making the call, TRUSTID gives banks real-time intelligence on inbound calls before they are answered. This works as the first layer for authenticating customers.

If TRUSTID’s real-time telephone network forensics authenticates the call as genuine, it routes the call to a call center agent without interrupting the customer experience. If it determines the call is spoofed, the bank can route the call based on the risk it poses to the system. By better understanding the risk of each call, TRUSTID provides a critical extra layer of authentication that’s sorely needed in today’s call center environment, as well as to help fulfill the latest federal security requirements.

Call centers warned about Telephony Denial-of-Service (TDoS) attacks

Posted on: April 10th, 2013 by art No Comments

Imagine a call center without the ability to take inbound calls or make outbound calls. That’s the impact that growing Telephony Denial of Service (TDoS) attacks can have on targeted call centers. Sort of the cousin to online DoS attacks, TDoS as designed to incapacitate call centers after initial calls for fraudulent transactions are made.

According to the article, “Telephony Denial-of-Service Attacks Prompt Federal Attention,” the Department of Homeland Security and FBI recently issued a “situational awareness bulletin” after a number of TDoS attacks were targeting public safety and emergency services call centers. The alert warned that criminals were phoning the call centers impersonating agencies to collect outstanding payday load debt of $5,000. If the targeted employees didn’t agree to pay, the caller would launch the attack that flooded the call center with enough traffic to disable any incoming or outgoing calls for a period of time.

While the recent attacks have targeted public safety telephone lines, the complaints don’t stop there. Many believe criminals are expanding the types of industries they are targeting. In the memo, the DHS said attackers are “targeting various businesses and public entities, including the financial sector and other public emergency operations interests, including air ambulance, ambulance and hospital communications.”

Using network-based forensics to verify in real-time the exact location of the telephonic device calling bank call centers, we at TRUSTID has seen similar TDoS attempts. Because spoofing Caller ID and ANI is a key component to TDoS attacks, curbing these attacks requires the ability to understand if inbound calls pose a risk before the phone is picked up.

In doing so, financial institutions need to find a better way to authenticate their customers over the telephone channel and protect their call center agents from answering spoofed calls in the first place. The TRUSTID® Physical Caller Authentication solution validates whether all inbound calls can be trusted, or if they are high risk. By knowing if a call is trustworthy or not before it happens, banks can mitigate their risk of TDoS attacks and other social engineering scams without having to invest precious time and resources on known fraudulent calls.

Phone-based authentication should enhance the customer experience, not erode it

Posted on: March 27th, 2013 by art 50 Comments

Should banks add phone-based authentication? Any financial institution that provides services over the telephone channel needs to have some way to authenticate every call coming into their call center. While the answer to that question is pretty evident, the bigger question banks should be asking themselves is what type of solution best fits their business model.

With fraud protection the top priority for authenticating customers over the telephone, another criteria for phone-based authentication is that it shouldn’t interrupt the customer experience. According to the recent article, “Two Factor Or Not To Factor? An Online Security Conundrum,” the main argument against phone-based authentication is it adds friction to the sign-in process. Does it? Well, it depends on the type of service being used.

Of course consumers want both a secure and seamless way to gain access to their banking accounts. After all, who wants to answer a bunch of challenge questions every time they go to access their account? While there are various authentication methods financial institutions can choose from, many can still delay the process by a few minutes. This lengthy phone interrogation can test the goodwill of customers, giving them the impression that their needs aren’t not the top concerns of banks.

One of the main objectives of an effective telephone authentication solution should be to quickly and non-intrusively verify customers without them knowing it. We at TRUSTID believe customer authentication should not impede the user experience at all. In fact, we think it should enhance it.

By combining innovative technology with the keen understanding of what customers expect from remote banking services, the TRUSTID® Physical Caller Authentication tool uses real-time telephone network forensics to invisibly validate the Caller ID and ANI before the call is answered. Achieving customer verification without requiring customers to answer security questions allows call center agents to immediately begin addressing the customer’s needs the moment the phone is picked up.

Imagine the impact on your business operations and customer relationships if you could validate them before the call is answered. Not only would you maintain and strengthen the confidence and goodwill of your customers, you could also save operating expenses through lower average call handling (ACH) times that other knowledge-based authentication (KBA) methods simply can’t do.

In other words, when it comes to customer authentication, the value of putting your customers’ needs first and delivering safe, exceptional service that exceeds their expectations can create a more satisfied banking experience without eroding it with costly and cumbersome challenge questions.

Using automated caller authentication to transform the customer experience

Posted on: March 13th, 2013 by art 51 Comments

There’s always been this notion that once a process or system is automated, the people who once performed that task will soon be out of a job. While some tools have certainly earned that reputation, when it comes to automating customer authentication over the telephone, it’s not about replacing people. Rather, it’s about proactively detecting spoofing risks, reducing call center expenses, and transforming authentication into a positive customer experience.

When caller authentication is not automated, this means contact center agents must perform a number of steps to verify that the caller is who they say they are. As we know, security questions are a drawn out identity-interrogation process that requires banking customers to answer a bunch of personal questions that can be beaten by clever social engineers.

Ultimately, this process drives up average call handling (ACH) times, increases operating costs, and can damage the important bank-customer relationship. And because personally identifiable information (PII) is not predictive of identity, knowledge-based authentication (KBA) methods, when used alone, can actually create a false sense of trust that puts company data and customers at risk.

A security tool like the TRUSTID® Physical Caller Authentication solution, however, automatically authenticates the caller using a combination of three core components, including:

Telephony databases (e.g., local number portability, numbering plans, carrier / line attributes, billing data, routing tables, HLR data, LERG tables, geospatial data, carrier and switch data)
Real-time telephone network forensics (e.g., call progress, call messages, network tones, SS7 and SIP signaling, DSP audio energy and voice analysis tools)
Specialized analytics (real-time delivery of proprietary credential scores that enable enterprise risk decisioning, customer-specific reason codes, caller data and reports for custom risk model and scoring)

Automatically validating the caller before the phone is answered doesn’t eliminate jobs, it provides stronger customer authentication while streamlining customer service.

What I mean by this is instead of using up valuable time and resources questioning customers over the telephone, call center agents are now free to immediately begin servicing and selling good customers at the initial “golden minute” of the telephone call.

By undetectably authenticating customers through their calling party numbers, TRUSTID helps financial institutions lower customer authentication expenses, reduce the cost of fraud as a result of telephone-based social engineering, and gets call center agents selling and serving customers, not identity-interrogating, which in the end can transform the overall customer experience.

How pre-answered caller authentication helps prevent telephone bank fraud

Posted on: February 20th, 2013 by art No Comments

Prevention vs. clean up. It’s a security question all financial institutions should ask themselves.

When it comes to providing a trusted customer environment, banks are typically better at resolving problems stemming from non-predictive authentication and fraud than preventing them. That’s because they continue to allow criminals to get their foot in the door.

What I mean by this is when banking customers place a call into a contact center, the very act of answering the telephone sets the stage for criminals to start their elaborate social engineering schemes. And once the dialog starts, anything goes.

Javelin’s director of security, Phil Blank, has long said when it comes to safeguarding customer environments, the biggest challenge is prevention. Done right, however, it can also have the biggest payback for both the bank and customer.

The typical scenario for customer calls looks something like this. A call center agent picks up the phone then proceeds to ask the caller their customer ID and social security number. Based on the level of information the customer is requesting, the bank representative may ask a number of challenge questions. At this point, they’ve already taken up a minute or more of the customer’s valuable time using knowledge-based authentication (KBA) methods that, quite frankly, can no longer assure that the person on the other end of the line is who they say they are.

In today’s many banking channels, criminals armed with the right personal and financial details they’ve collected over the Internet can convincingly impersonate an actual banking customer. In the telephone channel, for example, the very moment they’re able to talk with a call center agent, they have the upper hand.

Whether the caller is a valid banking customer or an impersonator, telephone interrogations impact banks and their customers in several ways, including:

Employee costs: Every second a bank has to validate and serve their customers counts. If a bank’s contact center agents still rely on KBA for customer identification, they’re likely overspending in many areas for identity authentication, including employee training, security systems and other internal processes.
Bank-customer relationship: Burdening customers with lengthy interrogations tests the goodwill of customers and impacts the overall customer experience. This can put a heavy toll on the profitable bank-customer relationship that’s important to any bank’s overall success.
Non-predictive authentication: Because personally identifiable information (PII) is used to socially engineer banks, it is not predictive for positively identifying customers calling into a contact center. Therefore, financial institutions should not rely solely on PII for identity authentication.

The TRUSTID® Physical Caller Authentication solution helps banking institutions solve these problems by validating all customer calls before they are answered. Using real-time telephone network forensics to proactively validate the physical location of the landline or mobile device calling the contact center, banks can determine the risk of each inbound call before it is picked up. This insight allows banks to eliminate the time spent authenticating bad calls and serve good customers faster and more seamless. As a result, preventing high-risk callers from reaching bank representatives builds a safer banking environment and strengthens the bank-customer relationship without having to worry about the time, resources and costs associated with cleaning up fraud after it has already happened.

How to turn telephone identity interrogations into better customer care

Posted on: February 6th, 2013 by art

How confident are you that the next time one of your call center agents answers the phone the call will be handled safely and efficiently? If your contact center still relies solely on a host of challenge questions to identify customers over the telephone channel, my guess is your security confidence level falls a few notches below where it should be.

We all know that the reliability of traditional knowledge-based authentication (KBA) today is not what it was a few short years ago. The Internet and social media websites let too much out of the bag these days. Anyone with criminal intentions can spend a little time collecting personally identifiable information (PII) and other public data they can use to socially engineer others over the phone. With the right answers to security questions, criminals can defeat KBA and other PII-based solutions designed to catch suspicious or criminal behavior over the telephone channel.

But what if you could verify the actual risk of the call before the phone is answered? How valuable of a security tool would this be in protecting your customers and confidential bank information? A lot, I would presume.

To put it another way, would if you could eliminate the thousands of hours spent each year on known high-risk calls and transfer all that time and resources into providing better care to your good customers? How much would that save on your annual operating costs, not to mention positively impacting the profitable bank/customer relationship? This is possible through the TRUSTID® Physical Caller Authentication solution.

By using real-time telephone network forensics to validate the physical location of the landline or mobile phone before the call is answered, TRUSTID helps financial institutions realize several security and cost benefits, including:

Reduce losses relating to fraudulent calls
Drop the average call handle (ACH) time
Spend more time servicing good customers
Spend less time identifying bad ones
Build trust and goodwill with customers
Improve the overall customer experience

When it comes to proactively identifying customers over the telephone, TRUSTID allows banks to non-intrusively authenticate good callers and instantly identify high-risk ones without relying on PII or costly identity interrogations. As a result, financial institutions have the ability to invisibly shut the door on criminal tactics such as spoofed calls and social engineering schemes to achieve a safer, more efficient banking experience for their customers.

In my book, continually improving the level of call center protection and spending more time and resources caring for customers is something both banks and customers can feel good about.

Do your customer calls all look the same? They shouldn’t.

Posted on: January 30th, 2013 by art

Without the ability to verify the Caller ID or ANI, all customer calls can look the same to call center agents. This a risky proposition for any financial institution that handles thousands of customer calls each day. In other words, if all calls appear the same there’s no way to answer some of the key questions all banks should know about customer calls, such as:

Which calls are trustworthy?
Which calls require further review?
Which calls require a contact center agent?
How can I better serve my customers?
How can I lower my authentication costs?

To improve the overall security and efficiency of the telephone channel, banking institutions need to be able to confidently identify which customer calls are trustworthy and which ones pose a risk. To be frank, any bank operating without a two-factor authentication strategy to verify callers is putting its entire enterprise, private business information and customers at risk.

With criminals potentially at every customer touch, combining multiple authentication methods is not only a federal requirement for fighting fraud, it’s a must in today’s banking environment.

Over the past few years, financial institutions have put a lot of resources into securing the online channel. According to some studies, these efforts have worked as the number of successful fraud attempts against banks have dropped. But this hasn’t stopped criminals from migrating to other, less protected banking channels like the telephone. This is where TRUSTID can help.

Our TRUSTID® Physical Caller Authentication tool is a proven network-based authentication solution that helps financial institutions proactively validate the Caller ID and ANI to secure the telephone channel, as well as reduce costs by spending less time interrogating customers and more time providing quality service over the phone. As a result of including a complementary, real-time authentication tool like TRUSTID to a bank’s anti-fraud arsenal, we help improve the overall customer experience and achieve true multi-factor authentication to protect one of the most highly used and targeted customer channels in the banking industry.

Archive for the ‘Call Center’ Category

The cost of bank fraud and operational inefficiency

Contact centers taking a lead role in the overall banking experience

Phone-based authentication should enhance the customer experience, not erode it

How to turn telephone identity interrogations into better customer care

Do your customer calls all look the same? They shouldn’t.

Search the Blog

CISO Text

CISO 2 Text

VP Quote text