When it Comes to Voice Biometrics: Do it right

I have a bad case of the "earworm". That's when music continually repeats through my mind after it is no longer playing. For me the earworm "T'ain't What You Do" is doing double duty. The opening bars are infectious enough to make it impossible for me to get it out of my head. Yet its underlying message is what makes it truly memorable:

"It ain't what you do, it's the way that you do it. That's what get results.".

The connection to biometrics-based customer ID and verification is obvious, right? Knowing what to do isn't the problem. Every company with a contact center, customers, and multichannel strategy for care and support knows that it has to establish trusted communications links with their customers 24/7/365.

The problem is, they don't know exactly how to do it… yet.

Strong authentication makes it possible to offer personalized services while preventing fraudulent transactions. Unfortunately, the way that they do it, like one-time-passwords over SMS or "Out-of-wallet" challenge questions, is not secure enough and creates an unpleasant experience for the customers.

Enter NICE's Real Time Authentication Suite.

The way to "do it", meaning "balance security with a pleasant user experience" requires a technology strategy designed to minimize customer friction. That applies both to initial enrollment and to ongoing, continuous authentication.

It starts with customer enrollment. In contact centers, voice is first. To ensure high and fast enrollment rates, spoken conversations between customers and agents can be used, as part of a passive enrollment strategy to transform recorded conversations into trusted customer voiceprints en masse. These are at the core of a robust system for continuous voice-based authentication system. Here again, "It ain't what you do, it's the way that you do it."

A key differentiator in NICE's approach is its ability to passively enroll a single, text-independent voiceprint and employ it across several applications and use cases. That single voice print can be invoked in all the communication channels that the contact center has with the customers, eliminating the need for the customer to do anything overtly to enroll.

NICE RTA enables a single voiceprint to be used during a conversational interaction according to established rules based on the risk associated with the call. For example, a spoken conversation can be compared with stored voiceprints to calculate the certainty that a caller is whom he or she claims to be in real time. It can be invoked later or on a continuous basis to detect whether the speaker has changed in the course of a conversation, protecting against a playback attack.

And That's What Gets Positive Results

Thus it is easy to make voice biometrics into one part of a multi-factor, layered and risk-aware approach to authentication, fraud loss reduction and authorization strategy without multiple enrollments or multiple requests to say a specific set of words or passphrase. That's very much a win from a security perspective, and from the vantage point of customer experience because, when all is said and done, security and fraud prevention are two instances where the goals of companies and their customers coincide.

In summary – enroll once, authenticate anytime anywhere with zero customer effort. That's what I call doing it right.