/Contact Centers and voice biometrics: a revolution in cost, security and customer experience

Article
December 16, 2021

Miguel Zarraluqui

Head of Product Marketing

Voice biometrics can reduce customer identification time by more than 90%.

30 seconds is an eternity

If we were asked to say how much we would be willing to pay to sleep 30 more seconds each month, surely, it wouldn’t be much. Frankly, no one would think that their rest could improve with so little extra bedtime per month. But if they told us that, for the same price (or even less), we could multiply those 30 seconds by 500,000, reaching a figure of 15 million seconds, or in other words, more than 4,000 hours, what price would we be willing to pay?

30 seconds is the average time that companies spend to authenticate their customers when per call. And 500,000 is the monthly call volume that one of Veridas major customers receives in their Contact Center. This translates into real savings of approximately 4,000 hours per month (50,000 hours per year!) of phone conversations by implementing voice verification as a solution to authenticate customers.

A very clear ROI

The idea that a company can verify the identity of its customers by their voice alone, in a natural way (without having to repeat a specific phrase), in just 3 seconds and in any language, has an immediate impact on the costs related to contact centers. Not to mention the clear improvement of user experience.

Several value levers are positively affected by this technology. To begin with, the Average Handling Time (AHT). Until now, the most common way of authentication in a call center environment involves a tedious process of personal questions (Knowledge-Based Verification or KBV); a process that takes about 30-45 seconds per call and of a highly questionable security. In contrast, biometric technologies such as Veridas’ can completely eliminate the time spent on authentication. This text-independent solution can verify a user’s identity while speaking to the agent, without the need to cite a specific set of words, and with only 3 seconds of audio!

The First Call Resolution Rate (FCR) will also increase significantly. Considering that the average error rate for knowledge-based authentication is around 10-15%, leading to an increase in support costs of 10-12 € per call, equals a payment of between 600,000 € and 900,000 € per month for a company that receives around 500,000 calls per month on average, between 7 and 11 million € per year! On the other hand, implementing Veridas solution, with an accuracy rate of over 99.5%, would drastically reduce this figure.

Last but not least, the improvement in customer experience reflected through its most common indicator, the Net Promoter Score (NPS). Undoubtedly, one of the main advantages of this technology is that it allows us as users to forget all of our passwords or stop waiting to receive an SMS or an email with a code to validate a transaction. After all, biometrics does nothing more than verifying something that “you are”, your physical attributes (your voice), rather than something that “you have”, such as an OTP code received on your cell phone, or something that “you know”, such as passwords. The use of biometrics will allow us to shift from presumption to certainty when verifying an identity.

Biometric Authentication in 3'' = ⬇ TMO + ⬆ FCR + ⬆ NPS

Veridas Voice Biometrics: a globally recognized solution

To verify the veracity of claims made about new technologies, it is necessary to turn both to recognized bodies that independently certify their accuracy and to large companies that are already implementing them. This is where Veridas continues to demonstrate its global leadership by far. In the field of biometrics, the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) in the United States is the benchmark institution, which is responsible for the ongoing evaluation of different biometric solutions. It does so completely free of charge and with periodically published results. Voice biometrics is evaluated through the CTS Speaker Recognition Challenge, where Veridas is achieving top results that place it among the leading solutions on the market with an EER of 2.66%.

Additionally, Veridas has confirmed its dominant position in voice technologies in some of the most prestigious challenges in the field, where the engine has obtained fantastic results. In fact, it was ranked second worldwide in the SdSV Challenge in 2020, which evaluated different biometric engines in extreme conditions with short-duration audios.

That is why more and more companies are integrating Veridas voice biometrics solution for their authentication processes, both in a call center environment, as well as within their mobile applications, chatbots, or third-party communication platforms such as Telegram or WhatsApp. The appetite for this technology is cross-industry, from the telecommunications sector with clients such as Deutsche Telekom, the financial sector with partners such as BBVA, the alarm sector with Prosegur, the energy sector, etc…

As Bernhard Hochstätter, Executive Product Manager at Deutsche Telekom, stated during a joint webinar held last March, the main reason that led them to choose Veridas as their unique voice biometrics provider was the combination of a cutting-edge technology and a great customer experience: “No other solution on the market provided us with the same quality of user experience, thanks to the minimum time required for registration and verification, while guaranteeing such a high level of accuracy, with minimal error rates”.

And now, do 30 seconds still seem like not enough time? Want to chat about it?

If you want to learn more about the advantages and benefits of voice biometrics, we suggest you hear it first-hand from our partner Deutsche Telekom and how they apply this technology to optimize costs and improve user experience. Watch our webinar.