Australia’s Voice Leadership Forum convened its 6th annual meeting in Sydney last month and, based on recently published details, the role of voice biometrics to improve customer care was a topic of great interest. Specifically, Tim Andrew, general manager for ATMs and self-service at National Australia Bank, delivered the latest insights on the bank’s real world experience with biometric authentication. After conducting a trial with 2,000 employees for several months, the bank formally launched its voice biometrics service in June 2009, targeting the bulk of its 3.3 million Personal Banking customers.

As of March 2011, the bank had enrolled 130,000 voiceprints, relying on a self-enrollment process. At the Voice Leadership Forum, Andrew noted that enrollment procedures are under review and that the program might benefit from a “recruitment” process when customers sign up for online or mobile banking services. [Managers at Bell Canada and Turkcell, two of the largest voice authentication services in customer care contact centers, both found it important to make “onboarding” a seamless part of the phone-based experience, in effect making callers consciously “opt-out” of the enrollment process.]

As background: NAB handles approximately 45 million calls each year, 30 million of these calls go directly to telephone banking, 15 million are distributed to the bank’s 32 call centres, which employ the equivalent of 2,400 full-time employees. Five million of these calls are currently routed by speech commands.

Categories: Articles

Tags: customer care, Voice biometrics, Caller Authentication, Financial Services