Keeping Up With PIN Numbers Causing Problems

LONDON & NEW YORK - Biometric Security Limited, the leader in voice-based biometric verification security and identity management, warned that the unceasing need for customers to remember new PINs and passwords is becoming unsustainable and could be damaging institutional reputations, as well as leading to customer churn. This warning comes as new research shows contact centres in the UK alone spend £820m a year on caller identification procedures. Large call centre operators must do more to improve the customer experience, while protecting customers’ private information and control costs, according to Steve Morrell, the report’s author.

The new research revealed:

UK citizens spent 47 billion minutes on the phone to contact centres during 2006 making over 10 billion separate calls – up 350% over the past 10 years.
Just asking for PINs and passwords is now costing contact centres in the UK a massive £820m per year. In the USA, this figure reaches a staggering $10 billion per year.
The average time taken to manually verify a caller’s identity is twenty two seconds with costs ranging between £5 and £15 to reset forgotten passwords for every user.
Potential cost savings and reduced customer frustration

The emergence of voice biometric technology for identity verification has the potential to radically improve the user experience by eliminating the need for PINs and passwords. This solution can also substantially reduce operating costs for contact centres. In key vertical sectors like finance, manual caller identification takes, on average, 32 seconds and bringing the average duration of a call to more than four minutes. However, by automating the identity verification process, a typical 1,000 seat contact centre could save as much as £1.4 million per year.

“In trying to adhere to regulatory pressures and better protect customer data, call centres are establishing more complex identity verification procedures that are simply driving away customers,” claimed Paul Lindsey, Executive Chairman of Biometric Security. “Customers want to know that their personal information is protected, but they are starting to demand procedures that are simpler and more convenient. They don’t want to have to take an intelligence test to access their bank, utility or shopping accounts"