New Fraud Report Confirms Robust Identity Verification is a Strategic Imperative for Call Centers
From new enrollment and changing account information to completing high-risk transactions, call centers can be the first and preferred point of contact for customers desiring to do business with an organization. Call centers are also often ignored in the fight against fraud, making them prime targets for criminals seeking to gain access to legitimate customer accounts.
Understanding shifting fraud tactics and the advances in technology that can protect against them is a critical first step in protecting customer data. This is why over the past six years, we’ve surveyed fraud and cybersecurity professionals across a variety of industries and shared the results in IDology’s Annual Fraud Report. The report surveys hundreds of executives and analysts in risk, fraud, compliance and operations to capture the impact, incidence rate and perception of fraud on leading organizations. Let’s look at some of this year’s key findings.
Customer Experience is Paramount
This year’s report revealsthat balancing customer friction and fraud prevention has become the number one challenge businesses face in fighting fraud. In an attempt to verify customer identities, organizations often arm call center agents with cumbersome authentication processes. While these may keep fraud out, they almost always have a negative impact on the customer experience.
Verifying caller identities while ensuring call centers are efficient and customer experiences are smooth is something businesses need to master to retain customers and maintain a competitive advantage. In fact, 85 percent see low-friction identity verification as a strategic differentiator.
Forward-thinking businesses are leveraging mobile network operator data to quickly greenlight customers and utilize smart layers of identity attributes that work together to analyze disparate identity characteristics. This allows them to only escalate to additional authentication methods when necessary, As a result, there is less customer friction and protection against caller ID spoofing, which today is the most prevalent type of mobile fraud among 33 percent of businesses—this is an increase of 73 percent over the past 12 months alone. Multiple layers of attributes also help detect attempts to trick call center agents into sharing account information through social engineering.
Multi-layered Identity Verification is the Key to Quickly Greenlighting Customers
Seventy-five percent of businesses reported that identity verification has become more complicated in the last three years. As the prevalence of fraud increases, businesses must respond with more comprehensive fraud prevention.
Companies need to consider that call center fraud is one part of multi-pronged omni-channel attacks that target mobile, online and call centers. A comprehensive identity verification strategy will help companies protect all channels. Multi-layered identity verification that incorporates dynamic step up mechanisms such as dynamic knowledge-based authentication (KBA), secure one time verification. mobile network operator data or ID scan solutions are effective ways to quickly verify a caller’s identity and with multiple layers, harder for fraudsters to socially engineer. Consortium data that provides actionable fraud intelligence and insights into the current fraud schemes and activity across different industries and channels can also help detect and prevent omni-channel attempts at fraud
Moving Forward
Gartner research shows that by 2020, 75 percent of omni-channel, customer-facing organizations will sustain a targeted, cross-channel fraud attack with the call center as the primary point of compromise. Given all of the complexity around fraud, how do businesses foster trust among callers without increasing risk?
Identity verification isn’t only about protecting your business from fraud and preventing loss, it’s about increasing call center efficiency, building trust and showing customers that you value and care about their personal information. A proactive approach to preventing social engineering attacks will improve customer satisfaction, reduce call times, increase productivity and reduce risk.
For more insights on identity verification and fraud prevention, view IDology’s Sixth Annual Fraud Report here.
About the Author: Christina Luttrell is the senior vice president of operations including product, client solutions and marketing for IDology, a leader in multi-layered identity verification and fraud prevention. In her 10 years at IDology, Luttrell has significantly advanced the company's technology, forged close relationships with IDology customers and driven the development of product innovations that help organizations stay ahead of constantly shifting fraud tactics without impacting the customer experience. Luttrell was recently recognized as one of the Top 100 influencers in identity by One World Identity.