[00:00:00] Matt Smallman: Hi welcome to our continuing discussion of the business of intelligent authenticationAuthentication is the call centre security process step in which a user's identity is confirmed. We check they are who they claim to be. It requires the use of one or more authentication factors., where we dive into the real world of organizations, striving to balance usabilityUsability is the primary performance dimension of the security process. Get it right and both security and efficiency flow, but usability is all wrapped up in human psychology. It’s a complicated subject deeply linked to behaviour, not just that of customers, but also of call-centre agents., efficiencyEfficiency is one of three measures of Call Centre Security process performance. It represents the actual and opportunity cost of the security process, for example the costs of agent time spent on manual authentication or the missed opportunity for self-service., and securitySecurity is one of three key measures of Call Centre Security process performance. It is usually expressed as the likelihood that the process allows someone who isn't who they claim to be to access the service (False Accept). in their contact centers.I'm Matt Smallman I'm Head of Consulting at SymNex Consulting, where we help organizations deploy new technologies to solve customer experience problems.
[00:00:23] Dan Miller: Excellent. And I'm Dan Miller, I'm the lead analyst at Opus research where we coined the term intelligent authentication a few years back to sort of capture the notion of providing friction-free continuous identificationIdentification is call centre security process step in which an individual record is found in the organisation's systems of record. In this step users claim an Identity. on behalf of both customers and prospects, to help prevent fraud without interfering with, you know, the progress of e-commerce.
[00:00:48] Matt Smallman: So Dan, what are we talking about today?
[00:00:51] Dan Miller: Today? I think we want to start with the basics, which, for anybody that is, trying to select a solution to bring intelligent authentication into the workflows of their customers, their agents, their fraud department. It starts with a business plan. So, today I thought it'd be interesting to talk about what you have been seeing as a consultant to businesses as they evaluate their options.
And, and also out a little bit, and talk about sort of the trends we've been seeing. And, and we'll share this, it's going to be an interactive session, you know, but it does sort of start with the dollars and cents and where we find savings, where you justify the purchase and all that goes into you know, convincing the finance department that, that you're, you're making a good investment in a wise investment.
[00:01:41] Matt Smallman: That's great, Dan, but you've obviously been at this a bit longer than I have. So why don't you tell us about how, how it was at the start?
[00:01:49] Dan Miller: Sure. And, and yeah, let's do the pre you know, open started studying this back when companies were looking at alternatives for pins and passwords, you know, passwords supposed to be dead going back you know, to let's say 10 years ago.
And we were looking at bringing in biometrics as that sort of frictionless way and voice biometric specifically. Cause we were talking about the voice channel and there were some you know, solutions out there that weren't exactly cheap. So. It was a matter of looking at, you know, sort of a hierarchy of, of issues that had an impact on the bottom line, you know, dollars and cents pounds euros, uh, that that would justify sort of making a purchase.
And, you know, I met you back then. Um, so I had sort of the buy-side view. I could, you know, consult with vendors and what we were learning is the initial justification came from saving time, um, the length of a call and, and saving, uh, the use of. That your most expensive assets, which were your agents to support knowledge based authentication to ask those questions that are so annoying.
So you, you had this dual thing of an expensive solution that, that took a while and, um, and, and also, uh, annoyed your customers.
[00:03:25] Matt Smallman: That's that's the, to say I do. I do remember about, um, Maybe about five, six years ago being interviewed by a newspaper and just saying that you really can't get these kinds of solutions for much less than five to 10 million pounds and two to three years of project delivery.
And it, and it really was true that they were they're expensive and complex solutions that you had to really convince them. People to spend the money on, uh, invariably it was only the largest organizations and invariably it was efficiency and cost reduction that was, was driving that spends, and, and for those organizations, they really did deliver on that kind of, um, those kinds of savings and really, really did improve their customer experience to kind of, uh, almost a secondary to that point.
They, but they, they definitely delivered on those, those efficiency savings, but I think, think things. Change now about haven't they done? What have you, what are you seeing changing as you talk to vendors
[00:04:15] Dan Miller: and married changes are that, um, efficiency is just the beginning. Uh, we do, uh, as, as a community of, of solution providers.
Cause I, you know, I count consultants in, in this category as well. Um, want to figure out ways to move from just the largest of the large companies in the financial services industry, where you can justify large purchases now. Some of that, uh, some of the justification. So let let's say everything's the same.
Uh, the cost of technology is go down slightly, but you still need to look for sources of, of cost savings. Or other factors that that justify the purchase. And one of the first things we saw was drawing a straight line from strong authentication to fraud prevention, and that you could include some estimate.
Um, uh, fraud loss savings as part of the justification of a purchase. And I'm wondering if you, if you saw the same thing.
[00:05:17] Matt Smallman: Yeah, I think, I think that's really interesting for some of those largest organizations who deployed intelligent authentication, principally biometrics to start with. There were some of the world's largest banks.
And, uh, by then, by dent of that, there were also some of the world's largest target for fraudsters and as a result, their authentication processes that are evolved to be exceptionally cumbersome, lengthy time consuming, and as a result, inefficient, um, and they both address the efficiency issue and the security issue with those kinds of.
Um, early secure or strong authentication deployments. But as, as we look more broadly in the market, outside financial services and outside organizations with long enduring frequent contact relationships, that's not to say that there isn't a significant fraud challenge out there. It's just that it may not be, um, as, as closely related to efficiency because those organizations haven't necessarily deployed or are those kind of long and cumbersome processes.
So for fraud and fraud prevention, Um, has definitely emerged as the, kind of the, the compelling case of the, of the last four or five years for implementing more intelligent authentication methods. Um, also because I think it, it's just easier to, to, to get there. It's easier to make a, uh, an impact straight away, whereas, uh, deploying, um, authentication as opposed to fraud solutions.
You invariably have to wait for customers to return in order to start realizing those benefits. Whereas you can literally. Um, start impacting the fraud impact affecting your organization. On the first day you switch these kinds of solutions on, um, I am hopeful though, Dan, that we kind of won't won't get lost.
Uh, In a fraud and efficiency, and we'll remember that the customer somewhere at the heart of that. And have you seen any kind of, uh, and I know you started off probably with the customer as the, and the customer experience, probably as the kind of primary driver of new authentication methods about the pain of the password, but that's not how it evolved, but the, where do you see it?
[00:07:11] Dan Miller: Well, it is how it is how it is evolving. I mean, we were indeed seeing methodologies for continuous authentication. Across multiple channels, which means that solutions can't just include voice biometricsVoice Biometrics uses the unique properties of a speakers voice to confirm their identity (authentication) or identify them from a group of known speakers (identification). and indeed they don't. Um, but, but if you do take, you know, customer experience into account and you acknowledge that as you build a business case, things have to be quantified in terms of, uh, economic value.
Uh, we are, uh, seeing it as part of the justification. The, uh, the effect of providing a better customer experience, which, you know, in addition to streamlining and shortening calls, um, you know, it does translate into longevity or the life cycle of, of a customer. And there's a dollar value to that. Um, it, it also maps to.
Um, accelerating customers along their path to making a purchase or completing their tasks. And, um, you know, that'll feed into longevity as well, but there's an economic value to that, to it, to a spike in, in revenue. And when we think about it, you know, you think about the team of decision-makers that are getting behind bringing this solution.
Into the, the business organization and, and, you know, you just have to have some sort of buy-in because there's another argument around efficiencies. In supporting the fraud prevention strategy of the company of, of, you know, sort of, you know, detecting and preventing more fraud, you know, towards, uh, B before it becomes fraud or, you know, limiting sort of the workload that shows up as cases for, you know, those, those investigators that, that company's not, not just financial service companies, but just about anybody with a contact center has on board.
[00:09:07] Matt Smallman: So, um, for, from somebody who came from this from a customer experience angle, I think it's really interesting the way we've kind of got ourselves all the way back to that all the way back to that perception. Like when I think back kind of 10 years ago, when I started getting involved in this field, I think that was, there was just a general perception that.
That may be contact centers. As we know them, aren't going to be here in 10 years time and look where we are now, 10 years later in the, in the middle of a COVID pandemic where our contact centers are in some ways they're kind of the, the life raft of the organization. That's enabled them to keep in touch with customers, support customers through challenging times.
And yeah, there's, there is an awful lot of stuff that customers could do themselves that would like to help them do themselves more often. But I think we've really come back to the kind of really important role of the contact sensor in the future, um, to be there for customers at their moments of crisis and.
In addition to that, the kind of customer experience angle. We also have to think about the employee experience here. Um, the kind of people we're going to want in our contact centers in the years to come are not kind of order takers and process, um, completers that they're problem solvers. I think Nicola Millward at BT puts it well, they're kind of problem solvers that.
Diagnosis that diagnosticians, if that's even a, even a real world word, and these are not, these are not the sort of people who want to sit there all day. Um, following a rote process of please tell me your mother's maiden name and the second and third letters of your passwords and your dogs inside leg and your favorite.
Favorite color. These are people who wants to be out there solving problems, and they're also more expensive than the people we might've had in our contact centers, uh, in the past. So it's kind of the impetus for efficiency or also increased and where we have introduced intelligent authentication methods where we've taken.
Um, And authentication off the agent to some extent and made it part of all the systems and processes and transparency, both the agent and the customer. We've seen huge increases in employee satisfaction as well, not just customer satisfaction and that leads to retention and all of those kinds of. Kind of other benefits.
So yeah, I think it really is interesting how they kind of were coming back full circle. It doesn't, it doesn't mean that we don't still have to make an efficiency case. It doesn't mean that security is not really at the heart of this. If we didn't have a requirement for security, we wouldn't have a requirement for authentication and this would all be a lot easier.
Um, We can't, we can't forget about all of those factors, but I think it is, for me, there's always, always one of these features, whether that be usability, stroke, customer experience, um, security or fall prevention and, um, efficiency that always one of these in any one case, that's going to be the kind of the tent pole feature.
The, the thing that kind of gets everyone to, to, to group around and agree that it's the right thing to do to improve these processes. So it's really interesting for me that it was coming back to customer experience. Now.
[00:11:55] Dan Miller: Right. And I, hold on. I think what's really, really interesting in what you just said.
And I want to comment about it before I forget two of the things you brought up, uh, come through very dramatically. As you, as you build the financial business case. One is that your S the, the agent time that you're saving, because they're no longer, uh, you know, th this falls into that formula of the future of work.
That the agents aren't going to be agents they're advisors, they're they're, you know, specialists and they are more expensive. So the value of a minute, and this isn't just in financial services, this is across, you know, healthcare across, um, you know, any considered purchasing, you know, insurance and, and, uh, a number of, of verticals, um, that therefore, you know, saving a minute of their time in the aggregate.
Um, it, it. Just drops right to the bottom line or the justification of the purchase. And the other is the, the streamlining of the, uh, fraud detection and, and. You know, fraud prevention in general and, you know, that's part and parcel of, um, you know, reducing friction of you sort of giving mechanisms to, to put a threshold into place too.
Um, and, and, you know, rules or artificial intelligence, um, uh, things too. You know, uh, talk about how, or to govern how a call is handled, how a caller is, you know, the originator of the call, the, the transaction that they're trying to, uh, perform gets carried out. And as that gets routine and it gets streamlined, you know, you're, you're detecting more fraud and you're shortening it.
So those two things come out loud and clear in what you would just described.
[00:13:48] Matt Smallman: I again, as you, as you talk about it, it just comes back to me, just kind of like identification and authentication is, is so critical to these processes, the contact centers kind of raising that show that kind of the impact of getting it wrong and, or getting it right.
Kind of, they creep out like tendrils into every part of the organization. So that there's there's no, and one of the frustrations, I think for me, And always trying to make this cases. There's there's no, there's not usually one big killer metric. And even to some extent, the, some of the financial benefits doesn't really represent the, the value of the, of doing this better for the enterprise as a whole, because invariably kind of people draw lines around their budgets, contact centers.
Aren't kind of necessarily responsible for revenue and retention. Retention is difficult to measure the kind of the. And the impact of NPS on, uh, kind of customer lifetime value is, is to some extent, not yet proven, but we know identification authentication impacts it. So we know that by doing this stuff better, we can have pretty significant impacts on the organization.
Plus we can, uh, pay for ourselves, pay for it, uh, more locally to that, to the contact center. Right. Yeah. So there's just, it's just, just how, how kind of ingrained and tendril, like the, kind of the influence of getting this wrong and right. Kind of stress, which is what I find fascinating, but also a challenge to making the case.
Right. But
[00:15:17] Dan Miller: which, you know, the takeaway, I hope from our discussion here is that as a company engages in. The vendor selection process, which, you know, step zero is building a business case or justification. Um, you do take all of those things into account and you make it a formal part of the presentation in the business case of, so there, yes, there are economic benefits.
There's benefits, um, in, in worker, um, I forget what the term you, but, but their, their happiness, um, there's benefits in streamlining operations. And each one of those, there should be, it should be brought out explicitly to reinforce it. Yes, I can. I can build a business case dollars and cents, and I'm just starting to, you know, expose what the true advantages of bringing intelligent
[00:16:09] Matt Smallman: authentication.
I, and I think it is really, it is really interesting. Uh, just, just as we, as we wrap up just how, um, and I'm sure we're going to talk about this in another chat, but. The same things that we need to bring all our stakeholders together in order to make this business case, let's said there's likely to be this kind of tent pole will vary by organization, whether that's driven by efficiency because of kind of current economic challenges, whether it's driven by security because of the external economic environment.
And yeah. The amount of fraud that they're suffering, or whether it's driven by customer experience and a desire to differentiate. One of those things is going to be the driver, but no one of those things is probably going to make the case alone. So it will require collaboration between departments and teams and people who probably work together, um, to some extent today, but probably not quite as good.
Closely as they might want or will need to, to be successful in implementing these kinds of solutions. So you need to collaborate in order to create the business case, but that's, that's a good thing because actually deploying these solutions and being successful in their deployment requires, um, a significant amount of, um, collaboration as well.
And I'm sure that's what we'll come on to speak in some followup discussions over the next few weeks and months about how to be successful when, uh, deploying intelligent authentication. Yeah. So, is there anything you want to add just before we close? Just
[00:17:31] Dan Miller: that that's a promise that I think one of the explicit topics coming up in, in this series is.
Uh, who should be on the team who, who, you know, we're building this business case who should be involved, um, and, and, you know, just what the internal selling or, you know, you call it collaboration. That's, that's the ultimate end point you want there, but it, but it sort of starts with, with socializing and who, you know, what is, think of it as the graph, I guess the corporate graph that should be involved, um, in, in guaranteeing a successful implementation.
Um, that meets the goals of the business plan. So yeah, put that down.
[00:18:09] Matt Smallman: Great. So, uh, thank you very much, everyone for joining us today. I hope you found the discussion, uh, interesting. If not useful. Um, we'd love to hear, uh, any feedback you have either on this episode or on other topics you might want us to cover.
Um, Dan, where can people find out about, more about you and
[00:18:26] Dan Miller: it's true. Yeah. We'd like people to bookmark, uh, opusresearch.net. That's where there should be a steady stream of new articles and, and opinion pieces, if you will, uh, on this topic and other things that Opus covers, uh, and I'm at @DNM54 on Twitter.
How about you, Matt?
[00:18:47] Matt Smallman: Um, well, people can email me at, uh, matt.smallman@symnexconsulting.com. Uh, I'm not really on the, on Twitter. Uh, I'll leave that to Dan, uh, or you can find out more about, uh, some necks and use our welcome experience. Uh, scorecard ads. www.symnexconsulting.com. Um, so we'll be back in a few weeks time.
Uh, almost certainly with that discussion about how to get started, uh, with, uh, intelligent authentication. Uh, what's think about when kicking off your projects. So thank you very much for your time and look forward to seeing you soon. Thanks
[00:19:22] Dan Miller: everybody.
[00:00:00] Matt Smallman: Hi welcome to our continuing discussion of the business of intelligent authenticationAuthentication is the call centre security process step in which a user's identity is confirmed. We check they are who they claim to be. It requires the use of one or more authentication factors., where we dive into the real world of organizations, striving to balance usabilityUsability is the primary performance dimension of the security process. Get it right and both security and efficiency flow, but usability is all wrapped up in human psychology. It’s a complicated subject deeply linked to behaviour, not just that of customers, but also of call-centre agents., efficiencyEfficiency is one of three measures of Call Centre Security process performance. It represents the actual and opportunity cost of the security process, for example the costs of agent time spent on manual authentication or the missed opportunity for self-service., and securitySecurity is one of three key measures of Call Centre Security process performance. It is usually expressed as the likelihood that the process allows someone who isn't who they claim to be to access the service (False Accept). in their contact centers.I'm Matt Smallman I'm Head of Consulting at SymNex Consulting, where we help organizations deploy new technologies to solve customer experience problems.
[00:00:23] Dan Miller: Excellent. And I'm Dan Miller, I'm the lead analyst at Opus research where we coined the term intelligent authentication a few years back to sort of capture the notion of providing friction-free continuous identificationIdentification is call centre security process step in which an individual record is found in the organisation's systems of record. In this step users claim an Identity. on behalf of both customers and prospects, to help prevent fraud without interfering with, you know, the progress of e-commerce.
[00:00:48] Matt Smallman: So Dan, what are we talking about today?
[00:00:51] Dan Miller: Today? I think we want to start with the basics, which, for anybody that is, trying to select a solution to bring intelligent authentication into the workflows of their customers, their agents, their fraud department. It starts with a business plan. So, today I thought it'd be interesting to talk about what you have been seeing as a consultant to businesses as they evaluate their options.
And, and also out a little bit, and talk about sort of the trends we've been seeing. And, and we'll share this, it's going to be an interactive session, you know, but it does sort of start with the dollars and cents and where we find savings, where you justify the purchase and all that goes into you know, convincing the finance department that, that you're, you're making a good investment in a wise investment.
[00:01:41] Matt Smallman: That's great, Dan, but you've obviously been at this a bit longer than I have. So why don't you tell us about how, how it was at the start?
[00:01:49] Dan Miller: Sure. And, and yeah, let's do the pre you know, open started studying this back when companies were looking at alternatives for pins and passwords, you know, passwords supposed to be dead going back you know, to let's say 10 years ago.
And we were looking at bringing in biometrics as that sort of frictionless way and voice biometric specifically. Cause we were talking about the voice channel and there were some you know, solutions out there that weren't exactly cheap. So. It was a matter of looking at, you know, sort of a hierarchy of, of issues that had an impact on the bottom line, you know, dollars and cents pounds euros, uh, that that would justify sort of making a purchase.
And, you know, I met you back then. Um, so I had sort of the buy-side view. I could, you know, consult with vendors and what we were learning is the initial justification came from saving time, um, the length of a call and, and saving, uh, the use of. That your most expensive assets, which were your agents to support knowledge based authentication to ask those questions that are so annoying.
So you, you had this dual thing of an expensive solution that, that took a while and, um, and, and also, uh, annoyed your customers.
[00:03:25] Matt Smallman: That's that's the, to say I do. I do remember about, um, Maybe about five, six years ago being interviewed by a newspaper and just saying that you really can't get these kinds of solutions for much less than five to 10 million pounds and two to three years of project delivery.
And it, and it really was true that they were they're expensive and complex solutions that you had to really convince them. People to spend the money on, uh, invariably it was only the largest organizations and invariably it was efficiency and cost reduction that was, was driving that spends, and, and for those organizations, they really did deliver on that kind of, um, those kinds of savings and really, really did improve their customer experience to kind of, uh, almost a secondary to that point.
They, but they, they definitely delivered on those, those efficiency savings, but I think, think things. Change now about haven't they done? What have you, what are you seeing changing as you talk to vendors
[00:04:15] Dan Miller: and married changes are that, um, efficiency is just the beginning. Uh, we do, uh, as, as a community of, of solution providers.
Cause I, you know, I count consultants in, in this category as well. Um, want to figure out ways to move from just the largest of the large companies in the financial services industry, where you can justify large purchases now. Some of that, uh, some of the justification. So let let's say everything's the same.
Uh, the cost of technology is go down slightly, but you still need to look for sources of, of cost savings. Or other factors that that justify the purchase. And one of the first things we saw was drawing a straight line from strong authentication to fraud prevention, and that you could include some estimate.
Um, uh, fraud loss savings as part of the justification of a purchase. And I'm wondering if you, if you saw the same thing.
[00:05:17] Matt Smallman: Yeah, I think, I think that's really interesting for some of those largest organizations who deployed intelligent authentication, principally biometrics to start with. There were some of the world's largest banks.
And, uh, by then, by dent of that, there were also some of the world's largest target for fraudsters and as a result, their authentication processes that are evolved to be exceptionally cumbersome, lengthy time consuming, and as a result, inefficient, um, and they both address the efficiency issue and the security issue with those kinds of.
Um, early secure or strong authentication deployments. But as, as we look more broadly in the market, outside financial services and outside organizations with long enduring frequent contact relationships, that's not to say that there isn't a significant fraud challenge out there. It's just that it may not be, um, as, as closely related to efficiency because those organizations haven't necessarily deployed or are those kind of long and cumbersome processes.
So for fraud and fraud prevention, Um, has definitely emerged as the, kind of the, the compelling case of the, of the last four or five years for implementing more intelligent authentication methods. Um, also because I think it, it's just easier to, to, to get there. It's easier to make a, uh, an impact straight away, whereas, uh, deploying, um, authentication as opposed to fraud solutions.
You invariably have to wait for customers to return in order to start realizing those benefits. Whereas you can literally. Um, start impacting the fraud impact affecting your organization. On the first day you switch these kinds of solutions on, um, I am hopeful though, Dan, that we kind of won't won't get lost.
Uh, In a fraud and efficiency, and we'll remember that the customer somewhere at the heart of that. And have you seen any kind of, uh, and I know you started off probably with the customer as the, and the customer experience, probably as the kind of primary driver of new authentication methods about the pain of the password, but that's not how it evolved, but the, where do you see it?
[00:07:11] Dan Miller: Well, it is how it is how it is evolving. I mean, we were indeed seeing methodologies for continuous authentication. Across multiple channels, which means that solutions can't just include voice biometricsVoice Biometrics uses the unique properties of a speakers voice to confirm their identity (authentication) or identify them from a group of known speakers (identification). and indeed they don't. Um, but, but if you do take, you know, customer experience into account and you acknowledge that as you build a business case, things have to be quantified in terms of, uh, economic value.
Uh, we are, uh, seeing it as part of the justification. The, uh, the effect of providing a better customer experience, which, you know, in addition to streamlining and shortening calls, um, you know, it does translate into longevity or the life cycle of, of a customer. And there's a dollar value to that. Um, it, it also maps to.
Um, accelerating customers along their path to making a purchase or completing their tasks. And, um, you know, that'll feed into longevity as well, but there's an economic value to that, to it, to a spike in, in revenue. And when we think about it, you know, you think about the team of decision-makers that are getting behind bringing this solution.
Into the, the business organization and, and, you know, you just have to have some sort of buy-in because there's another argument around efficiencies. In supporting the fraud prevention strategy of the company of, of, you know, sort of, you know, detecting and preventing more fraud, you know, towards, uh, B before it becomes fraud or, you know, limiting sort of the workload that shows up as cases for, you know, those, those investigators that, that company's not, not just financial service companies, but just about anybody with a contact center has on board.
[00:09:07] Matt Smallman: So, um, for, from somebody who came from this from a customer experience angle, I think it's really interesting the way we've kind of got ourselves all the way back to that all the way back to that perception. Like when I think back kind of 10 years ago, when I started getting involved in this field, I think that was, there was just a general perception that.
That may be contact centers. As we know them, aren't going to be here in 10 years time and look where we are now, 10 years later in the, in the middle of a COVID pandemic where our contact centers are in some ways they're kind of the, the life raft of the organization. That's enabled them to keep in touch with customers, support customers through challenging times.
And yeah, there's, there is an awful lot of stuff that customers could do themselves that would like to help them do themselves more often. But I think we've really come back to the kind of really important role of the contact sensor in the future, um, to be there for customers at their moments of crisis and.
In addition to that, the kind of customer experience angle. We also have to think about the employee experience here. Um, the kind of people we're going to want in our contact centers in the years to come are not kind of order takers and process, um, completers that they're problem solvers. I think Nicola Millward at BT puts it well, they're kind of problem solvers that.
Diagnosis that diagnosticians, if that's even a, even a real world word, and these are not, these are not the sort of people who want to sit there all day. Um, following a rote process of please tell me your mother's maiden name and the second and third letters of your passwords and your dogs inside leg and your favorite.
Favorite color. These are people who wants to be out there solving problems, and they're also more expensive than the people we might've had in our contact centers, uh, in the past. So it's kind of the impetus for efficiency or also increased and where we have introduced intelligent authentication methods where we've taken.
Um, And authentication off the agent to some extent and made it part of all the systems and processes and transparency, both the agent and the customer. We've seen huge increases in employee satisfaction as well, not just customer satisfaction and that leads to retention and all of those kinds of. Kind of other benefits.
So yeah, I think it really is interesting how they kind of were coming back full circle. It doesn't, it doesn't mean that we don't still have to make an efficiency case. It doesn't mean that security is not really at the heart of this. If we didn't have a requirement for security, we wouldn't have a requirement for authentication and this would all be a lot easier.
Um, We can't, we can't forget about all of those factors, but I think it is, for me, there's always, always one of these features, whether that be usability, stroke, customer experience, um, security or fall prevention and, um, efficiency that always one of these in any one case, that's going to be the kind of the tent pole feature.
The, the thing that kind of gets everyone to, to, to group around and agree that it's the right thing to do to improve these processes. So it's really interesting for me that it was coming back to customer experience. Now.
[00:11:55] Dan Miller: Right. And I, hold on. I think what's really, really interesting in what you just said.
And I want to comment about it before I forget two of the things you brought up, uh, come through very dramatically. As you, as you build the financial business case. One is that your S the, the agent time that you're saving, because they're no longer, uh, you know, th this falls into that formula of the future of work.
That the agents aren't going to be agents they're advisors, they're they're, you know, specialists and they are more expensive. So the value of a minute, and this isn't just in financial services, this is across, you know, healthcare across, um, you know, any considered purchasing, you know, insurance and, and, uh, a number of, of verticals, um, that therefore, you know, saving a minute of their time in the aggregate.
Um, it, it. Just drops right to the bottom line or the justification of the purchase. And the other is the, the streamlining of the, uh, fraud detection and, and. You know, fraud prevention in general and, you know, that's part and parcel of, um, you know, reducing friction of you sort of giving mechanisms to, to put a threshold into place too.
Um, and, and, you know, rules or artificial intelligence, um, uh, things too. You know, uh, talk about how, or to govern how a call is handled, how a caller is, you know, the originator of the call, the, the transaction that they're trying to, uh, perform gets carried out. And as that gets routine and it gets streamlined, you know, you're, you're detecting more fraud and you're shortening it.
So those two things come out loud and clear in what you would just described.
[00:13:48] Matt Smallman: I again, as you, as you talk about it, it just comes back to me, just kind of like identification and authentication is, is so critical to these processes, the contact centers kind of raising that show that kind of the impact of getting it wrong and, or getting it right.
Kind of, they creep out like tendrils into every part of the organization. So that there's there's no, and one of the frustrations, I think for me, And always trying to make this cases. There's there's no, there's not usually one big killer metric. And even to some extent, the, some of the financial benefits doesn't really represent the, the value of the, of doing this better for the enterprise as a whole, because invariably kind of people draw lines around their budgets, contact centers.
Aren't kind of necessarily responsible for revenue and retention. Retention is difficult to measure the kind of the. And the impact of NPS on, uh, kind of customer lifetime value is, is to some extent, not yet proven, but we know identification authentication impacts it. So we know that by doing this stuff better, we can have pretty significant impacts on the organization.
Plus we can, uh, pay for ourselves, pay for it, uh, more locally to that, to the contact center. Right. Yeah. So there's just, it's just, just how, how kind of ingrained and tendril, like the, kind of the influence of getting this wrong and right. Kind of stress, which is what I find fascinating, but also a challenge to making the case.
Right. But
[00:15:17] Dan Miller: which, you know, the takeaway, I hope from our discussion here is that as a company engages in. The vendor selection process, which, you know, step zero is building a business case or justification. Um, you do take all of those things into account and you make it a formal part of the presentation in the business case of, so there, yes, there are economic benefits.
There's benefits, um, in, in worker, um, I forget what the term you, but, but their, their happiness, um, there's benefits in streamlining operations. And each one of those, there should be, it should be brought out explicitly to reinforce it. Yes, I can. I can build a business case dollars and cents, and I'm just starting to, you know, expose what the true advantages of bringing intelligent
[00:16:09] Matt Smallman: authentication.
I, and I think it is really, it is really interesting. Uh, just, just as we, as we wrap up just how, um, and I'm sure we're going to talk about this in another chat, but. The same things that we need to bring all our stakeholders together in order to make this business case, let's said there's likely to be this kind of tent pole will vary by organization, whether that's driven by efficiency because of kind of current economic challenges, whether it's driven by security because of the external economic environment.
And yeah. The amount of fraud that they're suffering, or whether it's driven by customer experience and a desire to differentiate. One of those things is going to be the driver, but no one of those things is probably going to make the case alone. So it will require collaboration between departments and teams and people who probably work together, um, to some extent today, but probably not quite as good.
Closely as they might want or will need to, to be successful in implementing these kinds of solutions. So you need to collaborate in order to create the business case, but that's, that's a good thing because actually deploying these solutions and being successful in their deployment requires, um, a significant amount of, um, collaboration as well.
And I'm sure that's what we'll come on to speak in some followup discussions over the next few weeks and months about how to be successful when, uh, deploying intelligent authentication. Yeah. So, is there anything you want to add just before we close? Just
[00:17:31] Dan Miller: that that's a promise that I think one of the explicit topics coming up in, in this series is.
Uh, who should be on the team who, who, you know, we're building this business case who should be involved, um, and, and, you know, just what the internal selling or, you know, you call it collaboration. That's, that's the ultimate end point you want there, but it, but it sort of starts with, with socializing and who, you know, what is, think of it as the graph, I guess the corporate graph that should be involved, um, in, in guaranteeing a successful implementation.
Um, that meets the goals of the business plan. So yeah, put that down.
[00:18:09] Matt Smallman: Great. So, uh, thank you very much, everyone for joining us today. I hope you found the discussion, uh, interesting. If not useful. Um, we'd love to hear, uh, any feedback you have either on this episode or on other topics you might want us to cover.
Um, Dan, where can people find out about, more about you and
[00:18:26] Dan Miller: it's true. Yeah. We'd like people to bookmark, uh, opusresearch.net. That's where there should be a steady stream of new articles and, and opinion pieces, if you will, uh, on this topic and other things that Opus covers, uh, and I'm at @DNM54 on Twitter.
How about you, Matt?
[00:18:47] Matt Smallman: Um, well, people can email me at, uh, matt.smallman@symnexconsulting.com. Uh, I'm not really on the, on Twitter. Uh, I'll leave that to Dan, uh, or you can find out more about, uh, some necks and use our welcome experience. Uh, scorecard ads. www.symnexconsulting.com. Um, so we'll be back in a few weeks time.
Uh, almost certainly with that discussion about how to get started, uh, with, uh, intelligent authentication. Uh, what's think about when kicking off your projects. So thank you very much for your time and look forward to seeing you soon. Thanks
[00:19:22] Dan Miller: everybody.
