One of the banes of phone-based commerce is the phrase, “Your call is important to us.” It tends to be the last thing an inbound customer hears from an IVR system before being put on interminable hold. It would be much more reassuring – and accurate – for an IVR to say that “Your identity is very important to us” and then, rather than indiscriminately placing each call on hold, to treat each caller according to his or her expressed preferences, status, or other known attributes.
Australia continues to be a hotbed for the latest in voice biometrics announcements. In another widely rumored deployment, National Australia Bank (NAB) has officially launched a voice verification service, making it available to the company’s 3.3 million personal banking customers.
Aimed at “delivering enhanced customer experience and security,” the public deployment comes after NAB ran a successful internal pilot involving 2,000 branch staff in May. The voice biometrics-based service is part of a multi-million dollar effort to upgrade a range of new security functions available to NAB personal banking customers.
According to a company statement, “With identity theft related fraud increasingly moving to the phone channel, the use of voice biometrics enables the effective identification, authentication and verification of customers, offering an extra layer of protection,” said Warren Shaw, executive general manager with NAB Personal Banking.
Successful authentication pilot programs have longed been rumored for financial services organizations, but NAB’s official launch marks the first bank – both in Australia and globally – to go public with a large-scale, customer-facing service. More to come…
Speaking at last month’s Voice Leadership Forum in Sydney, Australia, Paul Magee, managing director with Salmat VeCommerce, predicted “an insurance company and bank are going live with its biometrics technology in the next few weeks.”
True to MaGee’s word, Australian life insurance and wealth management provider Aviva today announced the deployment of a voice biometric service to expedite the process of routing customers to appropriate resources over the phone. Utilizing Salmat VeCommerce’s VeSecure service, callers to Aviva can be quickly verified in order to access all insurance, investment and superannuation products. Enrollment to the service takes approximately two minutes, but Aviva guarantees “subsequent calls will be a faster and better experience.”
In a statement, Frank Lombardo, Group Director Operations at Aviva said, “Voice biometrics is yet another way in which Aviva is improving [customer] experience for both our customers and financial planners.”
Aviva has set up a website page to address frequently asked questions about the voice verification system and includes a prominent mention on the company’s home page.
Aviva Australia, combined with funds management arm Aviva Investors, manages or administers more than AUD$19.2 billion in funds for more than 350,000 customers. Both are part of the global Aviva group, the world’s fifth largest insurance group.
In a widely anticipated deployment, Australian social services agency Centrelink has officially launched a biometric speaker verification system used to authenticate customer access to welfare services. The $2 million system has been in development for more than two years, including a pilot program for students and families, and is now available to up to 60,000 Centrelink customers.
Because customers were having trouble remembering passwords for phone access, speaker verification was implemented as “the only thing that might work beyond a PIN,” said Ross Summerfield, Project Manager with Centrelink. Additionally, the voice self-service system frees up Centrelink to handle more complex cases and hopes to improve staff efficiency in handling some 28 million calls per year.
While the opt-in system is initially targeting “customers without complex lodging requirements and who may need to routinely update simple information,” Summerfield says they have no intention of rolling it out to all Centrelink customers. To recruit the initial customers, employees have been actively calling and inviting prospective users.
Summerfield says enrollment takes about five minutes, with a customer repeating an access number three times, their name twice and counting “1 to 9” a minimum of two times. Once authenticated, the user has access to all telephone self-service offerings.
Telecommunications provider Telstra has managed the service delivery, while KAZ provided project management for connecting the system components to Centrelink’s security services. As well, KAZ built dual, text-independent speaker verification engines, with Nuance providing an additional text-dependent engine.
Though the program is only officially available to Centrelink customers this week, Summerfield said measurements during the 2007-2008 pilot showed that 90% of callers would prefer to use speaker verification over a PIN, with 95% finding the system friendly and easy to use and 98% saying they would use it the next time they accessed Centrelink.
A comprehensive study into consumer perceptions and attitudes in Australia and New Zealand has found increasing concern that current forms of identity verification, such as PINs and passwords, are less than adequate security measures in preventing identity theft. In an online survey of more than 400 consumers, callcentres.net found 67% of respondents were “very or mostly concerned” about identity theft compared to 63% a year ago.
And while high-profile security breaches and subsequent media coverage may fuel this public concern, the study, sponsored by Salmat VeCommerce, found 37% of Australians (and 22% of New Zealanders) have directly experienced, or know a friend or family member to have experienced, identity fraud or theft.
Additionally, consumers are increasingly uneasy that PINs and password could be guessed or otherwise compromised leading to stolen information and possible theft. According to Laurence Jackson, research manager with callcentres.net, the ever-growing number of PINs and passwords is adding to the uneasiness.
“There is considerable frustration among consumers at having to remember multiple PINs and passwords when dealing the various organizations,” says Jackson. The study found that 70% Australian consumers have more than 4 active PINs or passwords and account for some 63 million total.
Underscoring consumers’ caution towards the more traditional methods of identity verification, the study found voice biometrics as the preferred method of identification processes (45%), followed by PIN (21%), password (18%) and personal details or history questions (16%). To provide a clear understanding of how a biometric identification process works, Jackson said the respondents were each given a brief demo of the technology and then asked whether they would use it.
Still, some of the data presented in the study signals that consumers’ perceptions of identification technologies remains conflicted at best. For example, asked when an organization uses more technology, “I feel my personal information is secure” some 33% of consumers “strongly or mostly” disagreed compared to 26% in 2008. And when asked “how simple or complex a process you would ideally like organizations to use when identifying you,” 75% of Australians wanted a “very or fairly” complex security process, up from 64% the year before.
Jackson says these contradictions are perception realities and reflect a need for technology providers to better educate consumers, as well as pointing “in a good direction toward future technologies, like biometrics.”
After tantalizing attendees at Bill Meisel’s Voice Search Conference in San Diego, “relationship management” specialist Convergys Corporation formally announced an “on demand voice authentication solution” that integrates Trade Harbor’s Voice Signature Service into its call flow.
It has long been clear that voice biometric-based speaker identification and verification technology providers will ride into government IT infrastructure on the coat-tails of approved vendors. As a case in point, Raytheon Company is integrating Loquendo’s Voice Security Library into Redwolf(TM), its “one-stop” suite of solutions for collection, storage and analysis of digital audio and VoIP (Voice over IP) communications.
Voice biometric-based authentication and security took one step deeper into ‘The Cloud’ as Voxeo and Trade Harbor announced a partnership. Voxeo is a provider of both premises-based and hosted platforms for standards-based interactive voice response (IVR) applications. Trade Harbor launched its efforts to expand the reach of voice-based authentication using a Software as a Service (SaaS) model back in 1999. The two companies are joining forces at a time that Opus Research believes will be looked back on as an inflection point in the adoption voiceprints for customer-facing services offered over the phone
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