ICICI Bank, Limited, New Delhi, India
Name of Organization / Company: ICICI Bank, Limited, New Delhi, India
Category: Award for the Innovative Use of Technology in Customer Service > Financial Services Industries
Entry Title: ICICI BANK LIMITED
Entry:
1. BACKGROUND/BUSINESS PROBLEM
ICICI Bank is one of the leading Indian multinational banking and financial services company and offers a wide range of banking products and financial services for corporate and retail customers through a variety of delivery channels and specialized subsidiaries in the areas of investment banking, life, non-life insurance, venture capital and asset management. ICICI Bank is a leader when it comes to adopting new technologies and is committed to delivering a best in class customer care experience to its users.
ICICI Bankreceives approximately 25 million calls per year, with around 60 per cent of these calls requiring an ICICI Bankagent to verify the caller’s identity. The existing authentication process required customers to provide personal details or have the correct documentation details in front of them when they called the ICICI Bank. This process was time consuming for ICICI Bank’s contact centre agents, taking agents an average of 45 seconds to verify the customer. In addition, it meant regular callers needed to be continuously verified.
2. STRATEGIC APPROACH
ICICIBank sought to save customer’s time and frustration through making authentication a fast, easy, and secure process. The bank deployed Nuance’s innovative FreeSpeech voice biometrics technology, allowing customers to be authenticated through natural conversation over the phone with agents.
With the new ICICI voice biometrics system, customers no longer need to answer intrusive security questions, or remember insecure PINs and passwords. A voiceprint is created for that person based on 45 seconds of speech captured through natural conversation with an agent. The next time the customer dials in after enrolling, by simply speaking with an agent, that person is authenticated by comparing their speech to their unique voiceprint, which typically happens within about eight seconds of conversation. By leveraging the unique voiceprint that each person has, and removing the need for security questions, call handle time is reduced, consumer experience is improved, and security is tightened.
3. RESULTS/MEASURES
Since the implementation of the Nuance voice biometrics solution in the contact centre ICICI Bank has enrolled over 4 million customer voiceprints. The use of voice biometrics means customers no longer have to answer extensive security questions when engaging with the ICICI Bank agent. Customer feedback also indicates the contact centre experience has significantly improved, with repeat callers experiencing a reduction in average handle time of approximately 15% based on the enhanced authentication process. Customer satisfaction has gone up by 4 points
Further to this, voice biometrics has demonstrated a higher level of security than traditional authentication methods such as password and security questions. One of the key reasons is, unlike passwords, voiceprints are of no value to a hacker as they can’t be used to authenticate into a system (unlike passwords). The only input to a voice biometric system is a person’s voice. That voice is then compared to a voiceprint, which is not a person’s voice but rather is a set of alphanumeric values that represent a large set of characteristics of an individual’s voice. The voiceprint is not the key to the castle, a person’s actual voice is. And the great news is that voices are not stored in a centralized database, only voiceprints are, and these voiceprints alone are useless to a hacker. In addition a voiceprint is unique to the caller much like a fingerprint, and with liveness testing, recording detection and proactive fraudster identification to counteract any fraudulent attempts, taxpayers can rest assured their details are secure.
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