We’re living in a world of digital nomads who expect to be able to communicate with their favourite brands how, and when they choose. This trend, alongside the development of digital transformation, has meant that today’s consumers don’t have time for slow emails, long call-waiting queues, and complex chat strategies. The good news, is that NICE has introduced a strategy to overcome these common roadblocks to customer satisfaction.
NICE Real-Time Authentication simplifies the omnichannel approach to serving customers, by ensuring that companies can instantly verify the caller’s identity, then boost satisfaction through simple, contextual conversations. We spoke to Efrat Kanner-Nissimov, Director of Marketing for Multi-channel Recording and Real-Time Authentication, to learn more about the system.
Before Efrat joined the NICE community two years ago, she had around two decades of experience already working in the communications industry. Now, she heads up the team that’s responsible for activities around compliance, recording, authentication, and voice biometrics.
What is NICE Voice Biometrics and How Does it Play into Your Product Portfolio?
The Real-Time Authentication platform is an exciting concept for NICE, particularly in a world where companies are looking for more compliant, omnichannel solutions. I asked Efrat how the system plays into the current NICE portfolio, and what it can do for customers. She told me that as part of NICE’s omnichannel approach, the company is aiming to provide its customers, and their consumers, with seamless and frictionless authentication. NICE is doing so with NICE Real-Time Authentication which streamlines authentication across multiple channels using voice biometrics.
“The NICE Real-Time Authentication solution uses Voice Biometrics to verify the claimed identity of the person in the call. It does this within the first few seconds of a conversation so that agents don’t have to wait around to get the information they need to contextualise an experience and ascertain the risk of fraud.”
Using Interactive Voice Response, or IVR, before the agent even picks up the phone, NICE can make sure that the person calling is exactly who they claim to be. This means that companies can contain more calls in the IVR which becomes far more secure with voice biometrics, and in parallel, reduce some of the frustrations that clients face when they need to continue giving the same information to an agent time and time again.
As NICE’s only solution that directly influences the end-customer, NICE Real-Time Authentication completes the company’s portfolio omnichannel approach, bringing its benefits down to the consumer level.
What Makes NICE Real-Time Authentication Stand Out?
“NICE is the first voice biometrics vendor that uses the same voiceprint across channels, making it the only real omnichannel voice authentication solution. NICE Real-Time authentication creates callers’ voiceprints seamlessly based on their natural conversations with agents, and uses the same voiceprints for authentication on all channels. This way a customer calling the IVR can be authenticated using the voiceprint that was created for him based on a call with an agent, involving no effort from his end.“
The impact of this is enormous – for the first time, end-customers don’t have to actively enrol, which dramatically improves their customer experience. “Until now, the greatest barrier for adoption of voice biometrics was the cumbersome enrolment process via the IVR, requiring callers to repeat a certain phrase 3 times or more. NICE Real-Time Authentication can access historical recordings and live conversations to make a voiceprint available for authentication across all channels. The result is much higher enrolment rates and an overall more appealing customer experience.”
How Does the Solution Help with Compliance?
For NICE, the Real-Time Authentication solution is about making customer, and company lives easier. It eliminates the requirement for active enrolment by customers and therefore increases enrolment rates because clients can be seamlessly enrolled and simply authenticated through voice biometrics on all channels.
What’s more, though the system is easier to use, it’s also more secure, because it goes beyond the standard information used to authenticate clients.
“The name of your first school, your first pet, or your mother’s maiden name has become more widely accessible to prying eyes thanks to the rise of social media. This is one of the reasons why so many businesses are beginning to turn to voice biometrics as the ultimate solution.”
“Voice biometrics, fingerprints, iris recognition, and more biometric solutions for security and privacy are becoming one of the strongest and most popular methods available for authentication. What NICE does is enable businesses to harness the changing technology and implement it seamlessly, without the need for additional work from either the IT department or the consumer”.
The NICE Real-Time Authentication service is also coupled with the recording platform, which means that customers don’t have to worry about the somewhat tedious process of setting their voiceprint up themselves. Businesses can use the audio stored from previous call recordings to complete the process in an instant.
How Can Customers Start Using the Service?
As a solution that saves both customer and company time, it’s likely that the NICE Real-Time Authentication solution will become increasingly popular in the age of business agility and digital transformation. As Efrat told me, the company will be doing everything they can to make implementation of the tool simpler for their customers.
“We’ve developed a real-time solution that’s designed to support all of our customers, with on-premises deployment for large enterprises who haven’t made the choice to actively move to the cloud yet too.”
“Thanks to our recent purchase of InContact, we can also offer a complete cloud deployment for companies that are already moving away from legacy systems. There’s something for every business framework.”
