Balancing the Usability, Efficiency and Security of your Call Centre Security Experience

Whilst Usability, Efficiency and Security are the three dimensions of the Call Centre Security Experience Performance; a balance must be maintained between them. An organisation’s attitude to risk, commercial priorities and desired customer experience will inevitably emphasise one or two dimensions over others. My experience has shown that when one dimension is significantly higher or lower than the others, the most significant opportunity is in bringing the experience back into balance rather than improving any specific dimension even if this means actually reducing performance in one area.

Options to consider

Here are some things to consider if you want to address the balance of Usability, Efficiency and Security in your Call Centre Security Experience:

Take a Risk-Based Approach to Authentication

One size does not always fit all. It may be that some services offered in your contact centre have substantial financial and regulatory risks associated with them, but this is almost certainly not true for the vast majority of calls. Some calls, such as those to find out your opening times or postal address, may have no risk associated with them. A significant proportion will only have customer data privacy risks so having the same authentication approach for every call across is not going to the optimal Usability and Efficiency outcomes. Risk-based authentication approaches do not have to be complex; just introducing the concept of higher or lower risk calls can significantly improve the balance between dimensions of your experience.

Implement Inherence-Based Authentication

Inherence-based authentication, often known as biometrics, is based on the unique combination of physical and behavioural characteristics. While you can use your fingerprint or face on your mobile device in the contact centre, this is usually based on the caller’s voice. Implementing this approach to authentication enables organisations to improve both the Usability and Security of their authentication processes. Higher authentication success rates enable greater self-service and the reduced effort for both callers and agents reduces handling time, so Voice Biometrics can also significantly improve Efficiency.

The technology behind Voice Biometrics has been around for a while, but there are now credible vendors at every price point with proven integrations to the major contact centre platforms. My book “Unlock Your Call Centre: A proven way to upgrade security, efficiency and caller experience” has several chapters dedicated to the latest best practice from my industry-leading implementation to ensure you are successful.

Understand the customer’s reason for calling in their own words

We all struggle with phone-based menus’ particularly if they are written from the organisation’s perspective we are calling and not our own. Callers are already used to speaking to smart devices in their homes, cars and mobile devices. Allowing them to express their reason for calling in their own words allows far finer-grained determination of their intent with non of the frustration of conventional menus. As a result, customers are far more likely to take up appropriate self-service options and speak to the right agent the first time.

Next Steps

Our comprehensive Call Centre Security Experience Scorecard will help you understand the current Usability, Efficiency and Security of your experience. I have more than 10 years of experience working with dozens of organisations to help them dramatically improve their security experience with significant bottom line and customer experience benefits.