DT turns to biometrics for authentication and fraud detection

Deutsche Telekom has selected Nuance’s biometric technology to help the team offer customers simplified authentication processes when calling the customer service hotline.

Once the inevitable bugs have been worked out of the system, customers will be able to speak their requests naturally instead of navigating a complex phone menu, while the sound of their voice can also be used to confirm their identity. It is still early days, but the cumbersome process of typing in long account numbers and trying to remember complex passwords with a capital letter, number, punctuation mark and human sacrifice, could be a thing of the past.

“We’re proud to be leading the way as the first German telecommunications provider to deploy voice biometrics on our service hotlines and making this advanced technology available to our customers,” said Ferri Abolhassan, Managing Director Service at Telekom Deutschland. “We can identify our customers quite simply and quickly by the sound of their voices and there will be no more time wasted searching for contract numbers. The procedure is one of the most secure available.”

As far as stereotypes go, the DT management team must be giddy imagining how efficiently calls will be directed around the customer service centre.

“It is no secret that consumers today have higher expectations and demands for the type of service they receive from the companies they do business with,” said Robert Weideman, GM of Nuance’s Enterprise Division. “Our conversational AI solutions enable Deutsche Telekom to power more natural customer service conversations and deliver individuals the help they need quickly and securely.”

Although there will of course be sceptical customers who will rigidly stick to the old cumbersome ways, those who embrace the technology will simply have to say ‘Bei der Telekom ist meine Stimme mein Passwort’ (which means ‘At Telekom my voice is my password’ in English) to identify themselves. It’s simple and efficient, the way customer services should be.

Voice biometrics work by digitizing a profile of a person’s speech to produce a stored model voice print. Each spoken work is reduced to segments composed of several dominant frequencies called formants, with each segment subsequently having several tones that can be captured in a digital format. The tones collectively identify the speaker’s unique voice print, which the Nuance technology will allocate to a specific customer.

Aside from reducing call times and improving the experience when attempting to find the right department, the technology can also help prevent fraud. The voice print itself is similar to a finger print in that they are unique to individuals. While no system is ever going to be 100% fool proof, the voice print certainly does sound more secure than security questions, the answers to which can be worked out by effectively profiling a potential victim.

AT&T is a company which has faced complications in this area recently. Michael Terpin is suing AT&T for $224 million following the theft of $23.8 million in cryptocurrency tokens which were transferred out of his account following a SIM swap con. To do this, the fraudsters would have had to gain access to Terpin’s account by answering the security questions. Getting around these questions has become somewhat easier in recent years, as more user information has become available through social media.

In theory, fraudsters could research what the answers would be by look at Facebook interests, employment history on LinkedIn or holiday snaps on Instagram. Security questions are hardly the most creative and this is an area most companies should look at addressing. Using a voice print to authenticate the identity of customers should remove a substantial amount of the risk associated with such con jobs.

While this is an interesting and useful development at DT, it is slightly behind on the times. Voice biometrics have been used by numerous organizations, with Royal Bank of Canada, Santander, TalkTalk, and Vodafone Turkey among those who have each enrolled more than 1 million customer voiceprints after implementation. That said, it is a nice development.