The contact centre can often be the weakest link in fraud prevention. But now we’ve partnered with Smartnumbers to add to our roster of security solutions with the Nuance Network Validation Service, filtering out fraudsters before they even make it to the IVR. It’s a double win for UK contact centres: enhanced fraud prevention and a better experience for real customers.
For many organisations, the contact centre is still the most important channel for customer engagement. But it’s also the most difficult to protect using traditional fraud prevention and detection techniques. It’s a tempting target for fraudsters, and research shows that 61% of fraud touches the contact centre at some stage.1
One of the biggest vulnerabilities for contact centres is the IVR; fraudsters exploit the automated messages for account reconnaissance or validating PII to enable future fraud. At Nuance, we already have numerous technologies to help tackle this threat, and now we’ve partnered with Smartnumbers to enhance contact centre fraud prevention for our UK customers with the Nuance Network Validation Service.
Smartnumbers brings insight from privileged, carrier-grade telephone data into the Nuance Security Suite platform to identify fraudsters pre-answer—a first for UK contact centres. Smartnumbers is integrated directly into the UK’s core telephone network to scrutinise incoming calls before they reach the contact centre and route high-risk calls to specialist teams.
The Network Validation Service assigns a risk score to incoming calls by analysing more than 50 attributes to quickly identify suspicious behaviours such as number spoofing, repeat withheld calls, country of call origin, the caller’s network operator and VoIP. By combining the risk score with a ‘Bad Voice’ watchlist result, our AI risk engine generates real-time fraudster detection alerts with increased accuracy, reducing the number false positives so fraud teams can focus their efforts on real fraud attempts.
The Network Validation Service is also a great way to enhance the customer authentication process. The combination of risk scores and real-time passive voice biometric scores means contact centres can lower the acceptable biometric verification threshold, further reducing friction for customers. For example, for the majority of genuine customers, the network Calling Line Identity (CLI) will match the presentation CLI and the number on record for the customer. That helps reduce the number of false rejections and improve the authentication experience for callers and agents alike.
This is great news for UK enterprises (and their fraud teams) that are trying to balance fraud reduction with optimising authentication, making it easier for them to provide a seamless, efficient, and enhanced customer experience while detecting fraudulent calls at the source.
1 Contact Centers: The Fraud Enablement Channel, Aite Group, April 2016
