How to integrate voice authentication into your contact center

Fraud is on the rise. Are your contact center authentication measures ready?
CCaaS dashboard with magnifying glass in corner

In the past two years alone, enterprise contact centers have seen an 800% increase in call volume, with a 57% increase in fraud attacks

Modern enterprise contact centers clearly need to focus on caller authentication and fraud mitigation, both as a convenience to end-users and to protect against voice-based attacks. 

Balancing these needs while trying to migrate is really, really hard. Despite what they want, enterprise IT leaders are stuck in limbo: unable to completely ditch their on-prem equipment because their CX strategy and fraud mitigation are built around their ability to maintain call control and access the media that comes from call data. The upstream and downstream impacts of completely removing on-prem equipment without a cloud-based solution are immense. 

How to close the CCaaS integration gap 

Migrating your contact center opens the door for intuitive, innovative new technology and use cases. And while so many organizations have tried to move to the cloud once and for all, it’s a challenge to replicate their on-prem contact center ecosystem in the cloud. 

Voice authentication and fraud mitigation is an imperative for contact centers, especially for highly regulated industries like healthcare, finance, and insurance. In order to bring voice authentication to their cloud contact center environment, enterprises have three options: 

1. Building a custom integration in-house

Most enterprises maintain clunky edge Session Border Controllers (SBCs) to manage call control and fork media into voice authentication technology, like Pindrop, along with their CCaaS platform. Stopping your cloud migration here would be like moving into a new home right after installing insulation. Sure, it’s got a roof, but there are key parts (like drywall and windows) that are missing. 

In addition, the hybrid approach is a half-solution that can limit growth and may not scale with your needs over time. 

2. The CCaaS platform builds the integration 

The second approach to enable media forking in a contact center environment requires your CCaaS platform to rearchitect their networks. However, this isn’t going to happen—it’s a lot of work, and CCaaS providers have bigger priorities than redesigning their networks for your unique use case. 

3. The carrier builds the integration

Your toll-free SIP provider facilitates the media forking with a carrier-level integration, so you can be fully in the cloud AND leverage voice authentication technology from a third-party platform. (Spoiler alert: This is the best option for large organizations.)

To leverage this option, enterprises must unbundle their contact center telecom and go directly to a carrier through a model known as ‘Bring Your Own Carrier (BYOC)’.

Moving to and around the cloud with BYOC

Rather than purchasing your SIP trunks, SMS/MMS, and emergency calling/E911 through your CCaaS platform, you can go directly to your carrier of choice. 

Using the Bring Your Own Carrier (BYOC) model gives you added control, flexibility, and support that’s desperately needed during your journey to the cloud. Without it, you wouldn’t be able to integrate with third-party voice authentication platforms. 

The role of voice authentication in your contact center

Bandwidth’s carrier-level integration with Pindrop creates a bridge between your voice authentication and anti-fraud platform and your CCaaS platform. 

Because the voice authentication integration is initiated by your SIP provider, you can send critical call data to your CCaaS solution and voice authentication solutions in real-time. As your agents receive customer calls through Genesys, Pindrop is working in the background to ensure that your callers are who they say they are, prevent number spoofing, and protect your brand’s image. 

Let’s explore the different benefits of passive voice authentication for your agent and customer experiences:

  • More efficient, productive agents: Did you know that 20-40% of the time, valid customers can’t answer their own knowledge-based authentication (KBAs) questions? Passive authentication allows for more secure identification at the Interactive Voice Response (IVR) and agent legs, so customers can better self-serve in IVR and agents can resolve issues faster. 
  • Increased ROI: Improving IVR containment also allows agents to reduce average handle times (AHT) up to 30-60 seconds per call and frees up agent resources for escalation and resolution. You can also allocate more resources towards customer retention and revenue-generating opportunities like high-volume toll-free numbers. 
  • Better customer experiences: Integrating Pindrop’s caller authentication to your contact center platform means you can streamline data handoff for happier customers, better-informed agents, and more productive calls. 
  • Improve voice fraud mitigation: Pindrop can detect 80% of voice fraud, helping you close the gap on the weakest link of contact center security and reduce omnichannel fraud. This means you can better protect customer data, prevent bad actors from enrolling as customers, and make sure your company is a credible, trustworthy organization. 

How Bandwidth’s integration with Pindrop works

By building a carrier bridge between voice authentication solutions like Pindrop and CCaaS platforms like Genesys, your carrier can use media forking to capture real-time call audio and metadata.

When your contact center receives an inbound toll-free call, your carrier sends this data to both your CCaaS platform and Pindrop. If you’re using Bandwidth as your carrier, your customer calls will be 5X redundant. You’ll harness Bandwidth’s toll-free network, plus the networks of four other toll-free carriers, for maximum reliability.

Pindrop then applies advanced voice and data authentication to generate a risk score, enabling the enterprise to determine how to handle each call based on its perceived degree of legitimacy. At the same time, your agents can proceed with the caller’s needs. 

Here’s what the integration looks like in action: 

With Bandwidth and Pindrop in your contact center, you can build a best-in-breed contact center experience—one that’s interoperable, composable, and future-proof. 

Build your contact center, your way

Enterprises using Bandwidth as their carrier can migrate telecoms to the cloud, deliver a best-of-breed UX, better authenticate callers, and create a composable communications stack. 

Best of all, BYOC with Bandwidth means you have total operational freedom across your communications. Because we’re platform-agnostic, you can move to and around the cloud as new CCaaS solutions, use cases, and customer needs arise.

One universal platform to power it all

When dealing with migrations and integrations, you’ll have the most luck picking your carrier first—not your software. Bandwidth’s universal communications platform provides off-the-shelf integrations with the leading communications providers, so you can deliver an award-winning CX, consolidate your telco vendors, and move to the cloud, all with simple-to-use products.

Learn more about integrating with Pindrop, and check out the following resources: