The growing market for home-based virtual agents gives contact center service providers flexibilities in staffing – for instance, to shoulder seasonal call spikes – while still maintaining high levels of customer service with an educated and motivated workforce. But one concern with such a highly distributed at-home agent solution is to make sure the person checking in for work is the actual person contracted with the service provider.

To ensure higher levels of security, West Corporation has purchased Anakam’s comprehensive suite of products, including voice biometrics, to provide authentication mechanisms in verifying the identity of home-based agents. West at Home, with more than 15,000 virtual agents, plans to use the “Anakam Identity Suite” to provide strong authentication of virtual private networks (VPN) between home-based agents and their platform. The product suite enhances West at Home’s current two-factor authentication by offering customers the ability to deliver a one-time passcode via phone, email or voice biometrics.

The partnership with Anakam – whose roster of customers include government and healthcare organizations utilizing identity proofing and verification technologies – underscores West Corporation’s commitment to provide secure, multi-channel communications. While the announced partnership focuses on the authentication process of internal West at Home agents, and does not necessarily require deployment of voice biometric-based authentication, we note that Anakam’s technological framework makes it very easy to add voice biometrics to perform such functions as “speaker change detection”, which could be very important for managing remote agents. We also note that many of Anakam’s deployments in support of healthcare, financial services and eGovernment demonstrate the ability for applications to scale significantly in support of customer and client-facing solutions.

Categories: Articles

Tags: Voice biometrics, speaker verification