Fraud is on the rise in customer interactions, especially in today’s world where so many employees and customers are working from home in less secure environments. The attack surface for fraud is bigger than ever, and the contact center is one of the fastest growing vectors for hacks.

According to CSO, “data breaches cost enterprises an average of $3.92 million,” and of course can be many, many times higher than that. On top of the obvious costs of fraud, the regulatory environment is more stringent than ever, and likely becoming more so in the future. There is also, of course the impact to your brand – both positive and negative – that your customers perceive based on how much you care for their data.

Without proper security measures in place, these risks could cause significant financial losses – but also an opportunity if done well – for your business.

And let’s be real – most businesses today rely on Knowledge Based Authentication (KBA), which is easily hacked and causes significant friction on your customers. They have, on average, over 200 passwords, and other onerous security measures serve mainly to irritate them without providing much security. Your average teenager with decent hacking skills could breach most companies in a couple of hours.

 

Why You Need A Cyber Security Strategy for Customer Interactions

Developing a cyber security strategy for your contact center is essential, but it’s not always a KPI that is owned by the contact center leadership team. Security in general often falls to the CISO or CRO, who is likely in another organization, and may be focused on protecting data infrastructure, rather than the live interactions with customers. This is a generalization, but is true in many companies that we’ve interviewed.

There are numerous risks for businesses that do not have proper safety measures in place for customer interactions. Fraud, compliance regulations, stiff fines and loss of reputation are obvious ones, but also consider the time and friction on your customer for things like new account creation, inbound caller authentication, and the efficacy of outbound calling campaigns.

 

Trusted Identity Is the Linchpin

The fundamental issue, we believe, is establishing trusted digital identity in a fast, elegant, simple, and above all, high-veracity fashion. The risk of fraud is never greater, but the good news is that there are several converging issues, from consumer trends to advances in cryptography, that have made innovation in this space possible.

If you can establish beyond a shadow of a doubt the identity of the customer calling you, and if you can do that with very little effort on their part, your risk, costs, CSAT and revenue will vastly improve, and it’s easier than you think.

 

Our Zero Knowledge Identity Network

Journey has leveraged a powerful cryptographic tool called the ‘Zero Knowledge Proof’ and married it to network technology to create a solution for establishing trusted digital identity to up to 1:billion veracity in less than 2 seconds. This can be done most easily using the enterprise mobile app, where Journey can easily create an SDK to supercharge the power of your app and drive digital adoption. However, the same concept can be leveraged in a web browser, enabling significant flexibility for all your customer interactions.

Leveraging the zero knowledge proof, which establishes that a piece of information is true without showing it to an agent, enables businesses to almost instantaneously know the identity of the caller. It eliminates the need for pesky passwords or the time-consuming process of the back and forth between an agent and caller.

Because all that an agent sees is a pass/fail certificate, companies can use flexible staffing models, like work from home agents or BPOs, without needing to mask tones, purge logs, or worry who is looking over the agent’s shoulder at the sensitive customer information on their screen.

 

Seeing is Believing

We hope that this information has been helpful to you as you develop your security strategy and we hope that you’ll consider using our products in your security systems.

Please request a demo and see how our products can meet your company’s cyber security needs!