01732 759725 36 SECURITY handling (with an average reduction in call handling time of 45 seconds), higher self-service rates and a better customer experience. A recent Total Economic Impact (TEI) Study commissioned from Forrester Consulting found that a mid-size customer using Pindrop technologies over a threeyear period can look forward to operational gains of 10% and a 15% reduction in fraud incidents and losses, resulting in an ROI of 171% and annual savings of as much as $5 million. To date, Pindrop has focused on inbound call centres, offering a choice of on-premises and cloud-based solutions for authenticating callers and/or detecting fraudulent calls. This includes a new European-based cloud service to meet the needs of organisations, such as those in the financial sector, that for regulatory reasons require cloud services to be located in their region of operations. In the future, Gaubitch expects the company’s technology to be used more in small to medium-sized call centres and in a much broader range of applications, including authentication of voice assistants like Alexa and other voiceenabled IoT devices. “In the IoT market, with short utterances and short commands, you need to be able to tell who you’re speaking to within a much shorter amount of time – just a few seconds – which has really pushed technology to a new level,” he says. For the company’s partners, including alliance partners, service providers and solution providers, Pindrop’s expansion into new, largely untapped markets bodes well, particularly at a time of significant frustration with traditional processes (see box) and greater focus on the customer experience. www.pindrop.com the caller is a known fraudster or not. Technology is able to do that. “It’s important to note that this is not technology that will replace humans; it is really a tool to help human operators have greater confidence that they're speaking to the right person. “In that context, we believe: one, that technology should be non-intrusive – it should happen without interrupting the flow of the conversation between the caller and the agent; and two that it should happen in real time with respect to the conversation. We typically give our risk score within less than 30 seconds, and usually within 15 seconds, so the correct decisions can be made by the operators.” How organisations respond to risk scores supplied by Pindrop varies from customer to customer, but at root they enable organisations to increase checks on calls with high scores either by passing them to a fraud team or by prompting an agent to ask the caller more security questions. By the same token, they enable organisations to reduce checks for lowrisk calls, resulting in more efficient call The voice of the customer Pindrop’s voice technologies are not just useful for fraud prevention; they also improve the customer experience by enabling people to use their voice instead of passwords and KBAs (knowledge-based authentication questions) to access accounts or verify their identity. In a newly released Pindrop survey of 2,000 US-based consumers, many respondents said they found existing authentication methods more frustrating than flight delays, rain on a holiday, traffic jams or shovelling snow: n 63% find resetting passwords a huge inconvenience; n 55% say they have been stressed out by a digital identity verification system that didn’t work the way they wanted it to, with captchas and multi-factor authentication considered the most inconvenient forms of digital identity verification; and n 46% of consumers who have had a bank card stolen felt answering KBAs was frustrating or completely unnecessary when dealing with the issue. Pindrop warns that dissatisfaction with passwords and KBAs can have a massive effect on a brand’s reputation, irrespective of whether customers’ feelings are justified or not. For example, one quarter of survey respondents said that when their bank makes them answer KBAs, they view the brand as antiquated and inconvenient. When they have to answer more than two KBA questions to access an account, respondents admit to feeling frustrated (55%) and annoyed (57%) rather than comforted by (11%) or confident in (9%) the security the brand has in place. When those surveyed get locked out of their account because of a forgotten password or incorrectly answered KBAs, nearly 10% will abandon the account or brand entirely; 14% will blame the brand for a poor user experience. In contrast, a bank that enables users to authenticate themselves by voice alone is viewed as tech savvy (38%), secure (31%) and trustworthy (28%). Currently, 43% of consumers surveyed by Pindrop say they use voice technology on a daily basis (70% use it at least once a week), with many eager to see it extended to other areas of their lives, including voice-enabled parental controls on streaming services to protect children from mature content (71%); vehicle locking/unlocking and starting (70%); and accessing bank accounts at the ATM (54%). Commenting on the findings, Vijay Balasubramaniyan, CEO and Co-founder of Pindrop, said: “As the data indicates, consumers are starting to realise the value of voice-enabled technology and the convenience it can provide. If brands want to remain competitive and build trust with consumers, they’ll need to think about how to integrate this technology to create seamless yet secure customer experiences.” www.pindrop.com ...continued
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