New biometric voice verification solution helps contact centre operators combat identity fraud

• Sabio ‘Voice Verification’ solution simplifies customer ID process, while delivering enhanced levels of accuracy and security

• Fully compliant with latest ISO 19092:2008 open standard for biometric implementation within the financial services sector

LONDON – 10 September 2008 – Sabio, the innovative contact centre company, has extended its Hybrid Agent Framework suite of voice self-service solutions with the integration of Voice Verification software from Nuance. The new integration solution enables close inter-working between live agents and IVR applications, accelerating customer adoption of Voice Verification and allowing organisations to benefit from the improved service and security offered by voice biometrics.

Sabio’s approach helps organisations – particularly in the financial services sector – to directly address growing customer concerns around identity fraud. It will provide customers with a far more accurate and secure way of accessing contact centre services that traditionally require the sharing of confidential personal details and passwords with contact centre agents.

Voice Verification uses the latest biometric voiceprint techniques to make the customer enrolment and verification processes far more natural and conversational. Traditional contact centre ID techniques can involve up to five or more questions concerning account number, date of birth, mother’s maiden name or postcode, and can easily account for up to two minutes for each call. Using Voice Verification from Sabio, the whole task is much easier, with the customer only needing to answer questions as simple as ‘what’s your postcode?’ and ‘what do you want to talk about?’.

Sabio’s Voice Verification solution supports enrolment using the Hybrid Agent Framework. This allows a live agent to support the enrolment process ensuring success while building customer understanding and buy-in to the new technology. The integration is part of Sabio’s expanding Hybrid Agent suite of voice self-service solutions, and takes full advantage of the latest ISO 19092:2008 open security standard for biometric deployment by financial services organisations.

“Our new biometric solution has been designed to address two of the key challenges that have, until now, prevented the mass adoption of voice verification technology – difficulties in enrolling customers for voice-enabled services, and broader customer acceptance,” commented Stuart Dorman, Solutions Architect at Sabio. “However with our new Voice Verification offering we’re implementing new techniques that help automate enrolment, and are also finding that customers are increasingly supportive of initiatives that are seen to be improving security and addressing the challenge of identity theft.

“We believe that our new Voice Verification integration has the potential to dramatically improve the usability of telephone authentication, while also enhancing security and reducing fraud. We’re also finding that consumer acceptance of voice verification is also significantly increased when customer service staff are given the time to really explain the benefits of the technology – specifically the enhanced security and ease of authentication once enrolled,” he continued.

Sabio’s Voice Verification integration makes authentication much easier for customers by avoiding the need to ask lots of personal questions. The technology further improves security by keeping confidential personal details away from contact centre staff, significantly reducing the threat of criminal coercion for agents. Additionally, Voice Verification removes the password reset problem – it’s physically impossible for users to forget their voiceprint – potentially removing up to 20 per cent of the calls that financial services call centres receive when customers call up to change their passwords.

With its dedicated Voice Self-Service practice, Sabio is one of the few contact centre specialists able to offer all the key elements essential for successful speech applications: a specialist, user-centred speech design approach based on conversational techniques, proven persona and customer engagement strategies, business and systems integration skills, and the latest open standards-based technologies. Sabio Voice Verification is one of the company’s growing suite of Hybrid Agent applications, which already includes PCI-adherent Secure Credit Card Payment, Agent Salutation and a Digital Signature capability.

The ISO 19092:2008, Financial services – Biometrics – Security framework standard establishes the security requirements for the implementation and management of state-of-the-art biometric identification technology within the financial industry. According to ISO, biometrics is increasingly considered as a reliable means of identification, and includes such technologies as fingerprint recognition, voice identification, iris and facial image scanning.