Voice-Based Identification

In our current world of rapid globalization, more business is being conducted over the telephone and internet than ever before with key players often never meeting face-to-face. This allows small businesses to have a larger reach and market than they might have been able to achieve only a few years ago. Unfortunately, there are those in the world looking to fraudulently capitalize on these types of transactions. Companies have to be ever vigilant in the fight against identity theft and payment fraud. Most financial institutions rely on customer-defined PIN numbers, passwords and security questions to verify identity and complete electronic or telephone transactions. Other businesses are just as vulnerable yet they rarely require any kind of verification to complete an order or transaction.

Voice Commerce has developed a platform to provide voice identification, verification and payment services for businesses. The VoiceTransact Trust Center uses voice signature information to identify and verify a customer's identity before allowing a transaction to be completed. Not only can this technology be utilized to reduce payment fraud and identity theft perpetrated on a business, it could also help reduce call center costs by eliminating the time taken by an operator to verify a customer's identity. An IVR system could be implemented to verify the identity of a caller as part of the process of routing the caller to the correct call center operator. This would would allow the call center operator to immediately begin work on the customer's issue rather than having to spend time verifying the caller's identity through security questions and PIN numbers. Voice-based identification technology may not put an end to identity theft and fraud, but it will surely reduce the number of cases and could improve business processes along the way.

IVR and Voice Biometrics

In an effort to ensure security in these times of increasing identity theft, businesses that deal in sensitive customer information must be extremely vigilant as the gatekeeper of such information. Under current conditions, most credit card users, for example, are prompted to answer a number of standard questions supplied by an IVR system with the goal being verification of the customer's identity before giving sensitive account access. Often times, customers will find that after they have suitably identified themselves through their unique answers to the IVR system's security protocols, they are connected to a customer service representative who will ask some of the same and/or additional questions to further verify their identities. This can not only be frustrating, but also a tremendous waste of resources.

One area of research aimed to improve the process is the technology of voice biometrics. Employing the concept that every person has a unique "voice print," the system aims to verify a customer's identity by comparing his voice to a stored sample. Of course this idea does not come without issues to consider, chief among them is extraneous noise introduced during the recognition process by a poor telephone connection or from external sources in the customer's calling environment. Opus Research recently released a report on the state of the technology which is concisely summarized by it's author, Dan Miller, at TCMnet.com. As voice biometric systems improve through more pilot projects and widespread implementation, the technology is sure to offer resource savings for businesses that employ them as well as improved experiences for customers that use them.