How Can Fraud Prevention Improve Contact Center Efficiency?

What do you picture when you think of contact center caller authentication? Maybe it’s trying to remember how you spelled the name of your first pet or repeatedly typing in your date of birth. Whatever comes to mind, you most likely pictured a tedious, additional task delaying your primary objective. 
 
Fraud poses a significant risk to contact centers, yet many contact center managers see implementing fraud prevention measures as a hinderance to their primary business objectives too. If the goal for the quarter is to reduce average handle time (AHT) or increase customer satisfaction scores (CSAT), everything revolves around call resolution efficiency – and fraud prevention feels like nothing more than an inconvenient source of friction for genuine callers. If callers are required to authenticate themselves with a security question or passphrase, their handle time will inevitably increase, and their satisfaction probably won’t improve. 

Innovations in Authentication

Five9 recently announced their industry-first native integration with Pindrop, inviting customers to leverage Pindrop’s top-tier fraud prevention with faster deployment and increased protection. This safeguarding is frictionless for both the customer and the contact center agent. 
 
Pindrop is able to ingest a call’s audio and signaling metadata to perform a multi-factor analysis on an inbound caller without wasting the caller’s time forcing them to authenticate themselves by answering questions. Five9’s Intelligent Virtual Agents (IVAs) can also be programmed to automatically receive the caller authentication status and risk scores before a call reaches a live agent.  

David, Partner Alliance Manager at Pindrop, wrote a great blog exploring all the features contained within Five9 and Pindrop’s integration, which can be read here. The balancing act between contact center security and efficiency is obsolete; contact centers can safeguard customer data without creating friction for genuine callers.

But it goes further than this. 

The Transformation: Viewing Fraud Prevention as Routing Intelligence 

The Five9 and Pindrop telco integration is bigger than frictionless caller authentication. Organizations must understand that fraud prevention technology is a vital component of improving customer experience, operational efficiency, and in many cases, profitability. Cutting-edge fraud protection and prevention accentuates a contact center’s ability to route calls intelligently between their AI-powered virtual agents and live agents. 
 
The race to deliver the best customer experience revolves around customer data. Inbound routing engines continue to diversify — pushing the limits of how precisely a contact center can understand an inbound caller’s context, journey, intent, and behavior in a way that connects them with an agent who is appropriate for the call and empowered with guidance. 

Through this lens, caller authentication is another facet that enhances a contact center's intelligence. Many agents are already equipped with Agent Assist tools that provide real-time guidance for how to best navigate an interaction. Passive caller authentication information can further enhance these tools. Five9 and Pindrop constructed a pre-built agent user interface that delivers call risk and authentication status and can also include policy-driven instructions in a clear, intuitive way. Agents are then equipped to handle suspicious calls safely, quickly, and consistently. 

Five9 also provides pre-built Intelligent Virtual Agent workflow creation templates, making it easy for organizations to determine how best to handle suspicious inbound calls before they are routed to a live agent. For example, contact center administrators can decide that calls with a Pindrop risk score higher than 90% are routed to a dedicated fraud-prevention team within the contact center. Having strategies and tools in place to deal with suspicious callers effectively ensures genuine callers receive the attention they deserve without delay. 

Conclusion 

Advanced fraud prevention not only frees genuine callers from tedious authentication tasks; it also elevates the quality and efficiency of inbound customer experiences with improved routing and agent assistance. Upgrading fraud protection software might just be the next way to improve AHT or CSAT scores. Learn more about Five9’s industry-first telco integration with Pindrop here.