--- title: "The Commercial Case for Intelligent Authentication" url: "https://symnexconsulting.com/video/commercial-case-for-intelligent-authentication" date: "2021-01-05" author: "Matt Smallman, Dan Miller" category: "Make The Case" description: "In the second instalment of \"The Business of Intelligent Authentication\", Dan Miller of Opus Research and I discussed making the business case for it." video: "https://stream.mux.com/8ffH7L6SH00vFdgjL00v1eBB007RwK6jkva701pmL1402dYI.m3u8" --- # The Commercial Case for Intelligent Authentication _In the second instalment of "The Business of Intelligent Authentication", Dan Miller of Opus Research and I discussed making the business case for it._ In the second instalment of our occasional video series "The Business of Intelligent Authentication," Dan Miller of Opus Research and I discussed making the business case for intelligent authentication. It was fascinating to reflect on how the case has evolved over the years and why now might be the right time for many organisations to go back and look again. We covered: - **Traditional View** - Efficiency - It's all about efficiency and reducing cost through reduced agent handle time. Whilst true for most organisations, these benefits were often outweighed by the costs. - **Changing Fraud Drivers** - Security - Fraud is now everyone's problem, and Intelligent Authentication enables better defences without a massive detrimental impact on efficiency or experience. - **Future Strategic Imperative** - Usability and Customer Experience - The enduring role of the Voice channel and the changing nature of these interactions requires a different way of thinking about authentication. ## Transcript [00:00:00] **Matt Smallman:** Hi, welcome to our continuing discussion of the business of intelligent authentication, where we dive into the real world of organisations striving to balance usability, efficiency, and security in their contact centres. I'm Matt Smallman. I'm Head of Consulting at SymNex Consulting, where we help organisations deploy new technologies to solve customer experience problems. [00:00:23] **Dan Miller:** Excellent. And I'm Dan Miller. I'm the lead analyst at Opus Research, where we coined the term intelligent authentication a few years back to capture the notion of providing friction-free continuous identification on behalf of both customers and prospects, to help prevent fraud without interfering with the progress of e-commerce. [00:00:48] **Matt Smallman:** So, Dan, what are we talking about today? [00:00:51] **Dan Miller:** Today? I think we want to start with the basics, which, for anybody that is trying to select a solution to bring intelligent authentication into the workflows of their customers, their agents, their fraud department, it starts with a business plan. So today I thought it'd be interesting to talk about what you have been seeing as a consultant to businesses as they evaluate their options, and also out a little bit, and talk about the trends we've been seeing. And we'll share this, it's going to be an interactive session, but it does start with the dollars and cents and where we find savings, where you justify the purchase, and all that goes into convincing the finance department that you're making a good investment in a wise investment. [00:01:41] **Matt Smallman:** That's great, Dan, but you've obviously been at this a bit longer than I have. So why don't you tell us about how it was at the start? [00:01:49] **Dan Miller:** Sure. And yeah, Opus started studying this back when companies were looking at alternatives for PINs and passwords, passwords supposed to be dead going back to, let's say, 10 years ago. And we were looking at bringing in biometrics as that frictionless way, and voice biometrics specifically, 'cause we were talking about the voice channel, and there were some solutions out there that weren't exactly cheap. So it was a matter of looking at a hierarchy of issues that had an impact on the bottom line, dollars and cents, pounds, euros, that would justify making a purchase. And I met you back then. So I had the buy-side view. I could consult with vendors, and what we were learning is the initial justification came from saving time, the length of a call, and saving the use of your most expensive assets, which were your agents, to support knowledge-based authentication, to ask those questions that are so annoying. So you had this dual thing of an expensive solution that took a while and also annoyed your customers. [00:03:25] **Matt Smallman:** I do remember, maybe about five, six years ago, being interviewed by a newspaper and just saying that you really can't get these kinds of solutions for much less than five to 10 million pounds and two to three years of project delivery. And it really was true that they were expensive and complex solutions that you had to really convince people to spend the money on. Invariably it was only the largest organisations, and invariably it was efficiency and cost reduction that was driving that spend. And for those organisations, they really did deliver on those kinds of savings and really, really did improve their customer experience, almost a secondary to that point. They definitely delivered on those efficiency savings, but I think things change now about, haven't they, Dan? What are you seeing changing as you talk to vendors? [00:04:15] **Dan Miller:** And married changes are that efficiency is just the beginning. We do, as a community of solution providers, 'cause I count consultants in this category as well, want to figure out ways to move from just the largest of the large companies in the financial services industry, where you can justify large purchases now. Some of the justification. So let's say everything's the same. The cost of technology is go down slightly, but you still need to look for sources of cost savings, or other factors that justify the purchase. And one of the first things we saw was drawing a straight line from strong authentication to fraud prevention, and that you could include some estimate fraud loss savings as part of the justification of a purchase. And I'm wondering if you saw the same thing. [00:05:17] **Matt Smallman:** Yeah, I think that's really interesting for some of those largest organisations who deployed intelligent authentication, principally biometrics, to start with. They were some of the world's largest banks. And, by dint of that, they were also some of the world's largest target for fraudsters. And as a result, their authentication processes that are evolved to be exceptionally cumbersome, lengthy, time-consuming and, as a result, inefficient. And they both address the efficiency issue and the security issue with those kinds of early secure or strong authentication deployments. But as we look more broadly in the market, outside financial services and outside organisations with long, enduring, frequent contact relationships, that's not to say that there isn't a significant fraud challenge out there. It's just that it may not be as closely related to efficiency, because those organisations haven't necessarily deployed, or are, those long and cumbersome processes. So for fraud and fraud prevention has definitely emerged as the compelling case of the last four or five years for implementing more intelligent authentication methods, also because I think it's just easier to get there. It's easier to make an impact straight away, whereas deploying authentication, as opposed to fraud solutions, you invariably have to wait for customers to return in order to start realising those benefits. Whereas you can literally start impacting the fraud impact affecting your organisation on the first day you switch these kinds of solutions on. I am hopeful, though, Dan, that we won't get lost in a fraud and efficiency, and we'll remember that the customer somewhere at the heart of that. And have you seen any, and I know you started off probably with the customer and the customer experience probably as the primary driver of new authentication methods, about the pain of the password, but that's not how it evolved. But where do you see it? [00:07:11] **Dan Miller:** Well, it is how it is evolving. I mean, we were indeed seeing methodologies for continuous authentication across multiple channels, which means that solutions can't just include voice biometrics, and indeed they don't. But if you do take customer experience into account, and you acknowledge that as you build a business case things have to be quantified in terms of economic value, we are seeing it as part of the justification: the effect of providing a better customer experience, which, in addition to streamlining and shortening calls, does translate into longevity, or the life cycle of a customer. And there's a dollar value to that. It also maps to accelerating customers along their path to making a purchase or completing their tasks. And that'll feed into longevity as well, but there's an economic value to that, to a spike in revenue. And when we think about it, you think about the team of decision-makers that are getting behind bringing this solution into the business organisation, and you just have to have some buy-in, because there's another argument around efficiencies in supporting the fraud prevention strategy of the company, of detecting and preventing more fraud before it becomes fraud, or limiting the workload that shows up as cases for those investigators that companies, not just financial service companies, but just about anybody with a contact centre, has on board. [00:09:07] **Matt Smallman:** So, for somebody who came from this from a customer experience angle, I think it's really interesting the way we've got ourselves all the way back to that perception. Like, when I think back 10 years ago, when I started getting involved in this field, I think there was just a general perception that maybe contact centres, as we know them, aren't going to be here in 10 years' time. And look where we are now, 10 years later, in the middle of a COVID pandemic, where our contact centres are, in some ways, the life raft of the organisation that's enabled them to keep in touch with customers, support customers through challenging times. And yeah, there is an awful lot of stuff that customers could do themselves that would like to help them do themselves more often. But I think we've really come back to the really important role of the contact centre in the future, to be there for customers at their moments of crisis, and, in addition to that, the customer experience angle, we also have to think about the employee experience here. The kind of people we're going to want in our contact centres in the years to come are not order takers and process completers; they're problem solvers. I think Nicola Millard at BT puts it well: they're problem solvers that, diagnosticians, if that's even a real word. And these are not the sort of people who want to sit there all day following a rote process of 'Please tell me your mother's maiden name and the second and third letters of your passwords' and your dog's inside leg and your favourite colour. These are people who wants to be out there solving problems, and they're also more expensive than the people we might've had in our contact centres in the past. So it's the impetus for efficiency or also increased. And where we have introduced intelligent authentication methods, where we've taken authentication off the agent to some extent and made it part of all the systems and processes and transparency, both the agent and the customer, we've seen huge increases in employee satisfaction as well, not just customer satisfaction, and that leads to retention and all of those kinds of other benefits. So yeah, I think it really is interesting how they were coming back full circle. It doesn't mean that we don't still have to make an efficiency case. It doesn't mean that security is not really at the heart of this. If we didn't have a requirement for security, we wouldn't have a requirement for authentication, and this would all be a lot easier. We can't forget about all of those factors, but I think, for me, there's always one of these features, whether that be usability stroke customer experience, security or fraud prevention, and efficiency, that always one of these, in any one case, that's going to be the tent pole feature, the thing that gets everyone to group around and agree that it's the right thing to do to improve these processes. So it's really interesting for me that it was coming back to customer experience now. [00:11:55] **Dan Miller:** Right. And, hold on, I think what's really, really interesting in what you just said, and I want to comment about it before I forget: two of the things you brought up come through very dramatically as you build the financial business case. One is that the agent time that you're saving, because they're no longer, this falls into that formula of the future of work, that the agents aren't going to be agents, they're advisors, they're specialists, and they are more expensive. So the value of a minute, and this isn't just in financial services, this is across healthcare, across any considered purchasing, insurance and a number of verticals, that therefore saving a minute of their time, in the aggregate, it just drops right to the bottom line, or the justification of the purchase. And the other is the streamlining of fraud detection and fraud prevention in general, and that's part and parcel of reducing friction, of giving mechanisms to put a threshold into place too, and rules or artificial intelligence things to talk about how, or to govern how, a call is handled, how a caller, the originator of the call, the transaction that they're trying to perform gets carried out. And as that gets routine and it gets streamlined, you're detecting more fraud and you're shortening it. So those two things come out loud and clear in what you just described. [00:13:48] **Matt Smallman:** Again, as you talk about it, it just comes back to me, just like identification and authentication is so critical to these processes, the contact centres raising that show that the impact of getting it wrong and/or getting it right, they creep out like tendrils into every part of the organisation. So there's no, and one of the frustrations, I think, for me, and always trying to make this cases, there's not usually one big killer metric. And even, to some extent, some of the financial benefits doesn't really represent the value of doing this better for the enterprise as a whole, because invariably people draw lines around their budgets. Contact centres aren't necessarily responsible for revenue and retention. Retention is difficult to measure. And the impact of NPS on customer lifetime value is, to some extent, not yet proven, but we know identification authentication impacts it. So we know that by doing this stuff better, we can have pretty significant impacts on the organisation. Plus we can pay for it more locally to the contact centre. Right. Yeah. So it's just how ingrained and tendril-like the influence of getting this wrong and right. Kind of stress, which is what I find fascinating, but also a challenge to making the case. Right. But [00:15:17] **Dan Miller:** Which, the takeaway, I hope, from our discussion here is that as a company engages in the vendor selection process, which, step zero is building a business case or justification, you do take all of those things into account and you make it a formal part of the presentation in the business case. So, yes, there are economic benefits. There's benefits in worker, I forget what the term you, but their happiness. There's benefits in streamlining operations. And each one of those, it should be brought out explicitly to reinforce it. Yes, I can build a business case, dollars and cents, and I'm just starting to expose what the true advantages of bringing intelligent [00:16:09] **Matt Smallman:** authentication. And I think it is really interesting, just as we wrap up, just how, and I'm sure we're going to talk about this in another chat, but the same things that we need to bring all our stakeholders together in order to make this business case. Let's said there's likely to be this tent pole, will vary by organisation, whether that's driven by efficiency because of current economic challenges, whether it's driven by security because of the external economic environment and the amount of fraud that they're suffering, or whether it's driven by customer experience and a desire to differentiate. One of those things is going to be the driver, but no one of those things is probably going to make the case alone. So it will require collaboration between departments and teams and people who probably work together to some extent today, but probably not quite as closely as they might want, or will need to, to be successful in implementing these kinds of solutions. So you need to collaborate in order to create the business case, but that's a good thing, because actually deploying these solutions and being successful in their deployment requires a significant amount of collaboration as well. And I'm sure that's what we'll come on to speak in some follow-up discussions over the next few weeks and months, about how to be successful when deploying intelligent authentication. Yeah. So, is there anything you want to add just before we close? Just [00:17:31] **Dan Miller:** That's a promise that I think one of the explicit topics coming up in this series is who should be on the team, who, we're building this business case, who should be involved, and just what the internal selling, or you call it collaboration. That's the ultimate end point you want there, but it starts with socialising and who, what is, think of it as the graph, I guess, the corporate graph, that should be involved in guaranteeing a successful implementation that meets the goals of the business plan. So yeah, put that down. [00:18:09] **Matt Smallman:** Great. So thank you very much, everyone, for joining us today. I hope you found the discussion interesting, if not useful. We'd love to hear any feedback you have, either on this episode or on other topics you might want us to cover. Dan, where can people find out more about you and [00:18:26] **Dan Miller:** it's true. Yeah. We'd like people to bookmark opusresearch.net. That's where there should be a steady stream of new articles and opinion pieces, if you will, on this topic and other things that Opus covers. And I'm at @DNM54 on Twitter. How about you, Matt? [00:18:47] **Matt Smallman:** Well, people can email me at matt.smallman@symnexconsulting.com. I'm not really on Twitter. I'll leave that to Dan. Or you can find out more about SymNex and use our welcome experience scorecard at symnexconsulting.com. So we'll be back in a few weeks' time, almost certainly with that discussion about how to get started with intelligent authentication, what to think about when kicking off your projects. So thank you very much for your time, and look forward to seeing you soon. Thanks [00:19:22] **Dan Miller:** everybody.