The contact center is subject to fraud from bad actors pretending to be someone they aren’t. In many situations, call center agents must authenticate a customer’s identity. Generally, the agent prompts the customer for information that only they would know or be able to easily recall. This common knowledge-based authentication process, or KBA, is not only frustrating for users, but easily compromised through social engineering tactics. Many security questions like “What’s your mother’s maiden name?” and “What’s your place of birth?” have answers that are easily found on social media accounts or for sale on the Dark Web. With just a few pieces of personal information, a savvy social engineer can beat just about any KBA process.
KBA is also a time consuming process — taking a long as 20 seconds to authenticate the caller. In even a medium-sized contact center, 20 seconds is valuable time that quickly adds up. Reducing the time agents spend manually authenticating customers is one of the primary economic drivers for deploying voice biometrics in the contact center. The other is the strength of using the customer’s voice instead of KBA to achieve higher security.
