Ensuring a Satisfying and Secure Customer Experience

Gordon Loader
Avaya Senior Manager of Advanced Technologies Sales

Customer Experience is much in the news these days and not just in the contact centre. It’s an important process design consideration whether you operate a supermarket, petrol station, retail outlet or in fact any place where people interface directly with your business. It has a major influence on customer satisfaction and a direct impact on customer loyalty – a key factor in a company’s long term business success.

However, with CIFAS, the UK’s Fraud Prevention Service, recent report that identity fraud continues to rise, process designers are faced with an increasing challenge. Not only must appropriate steps be taken to ensure only genuinely entitled individuals gain access to the services they wish to provide, they also need to make sure the steps taken are a positive enhancement to the overall customer experience.

Sadly, this may not always be the case.

Think of the measures used when you travel by air. Multiple identity checks are carried out throughout the check in to boarding process. Depending where you travel and if you decide to shop or not, you may be asked to prove your identity at the check in desk, immigration, security, duty free, departure gate or even on a purely random basis.

Whilst this level of security is deemed appropriate to deal with the many and varied risks involved, it does illustrate one aspect of why air travel is one of the most stressful and frustrating customer experiences that exists today.

Given the growing threat posed to contact centres by identity fraud, you might wonder how identification and verification processes have been implemented and what the effect on the overall customer experience has been.

Contact centres must stay vigilant in the battle against identity thieves.

Sadly, too often the situation bears a striking resemblance to the airport example (being no less stressful and frustrating) with callers expected to identify and validate themselves numerous times as they are transferred between departments or seek to access multiple services. Rather than being part of the overall customer experience, security processes are applied in piecemeal fashion resulting in a somewhat choppy experience.

So what can we do to help better manage the experience/security balance?

Bring the customer to the heart of your business

Most traditional contact centres move the caller around the organisation from service to service or from department to department often leading to the need for security validation as each new service is invoked. New Session Initiation Protocol (SIP) based collaboration technology allows us to turn this approach on its head, anchoring each customer’s call in a centralised conference hub, and then introducing resources, such as an appropriately skilled agent, or other automated service, such as balance enquiry, to the customer’s media session as required.

One time identification and verification (ID&V)

The concept of anchoring the caller rather than routing them around the organisation allows us to make use of a one time identification and verification process. With the caller anchored in a secure conference session, a single ID&V process can be carried out prior to making available other services such as account look up, access to agents etc.

Contact centre managers may want to consider advanced technologies such as biometric voice recognition systems that match a caller’s voiceprint with a secure database to ensure they are genuine.

Use context to determine appropriate and allowable services

Traditional contact centre systems lack technology to enable context to be used to any great extent. The advent of collaboration solutions that make use of Web Services/SIP has opened up many sources that can provide rich context about a caller. Items such as presence, location, call history, customer history, and social media can all be used to provide an intelligent knowledge base with which to determine how to a handle a particular call. Such context information can also be used to determine which services should be made available to a caller and which should be held back.

If the current trends are maintained, security will continue to grow in importance in the contact centre. Striking a fine line between ensuring business integrity and providing a rich customer experience will be critical to business success.

Source: www.avaya.com