Customer service organizations were already grappling with more complex regulations designed to protect consumers from fraud, causing Average Handle Times (AHTs) to rise, and deepening the frustration across all the participants – customers, agents, contact center operators, and the brands and agencies working hard to make life easier – not harder.

Time is money, and the complexities associated with security have driven up expenses, and many software and security companies have been working to automate authentication and identity verification to solve for the increasingly difficult challenges.

But AHT is just one metric that can be improved. Others include fraud prevention, improving outbound connection rates, streamlining regulatory compliance, and driving up customer satisfaction rates.

Last week, Denver-based Journey came out of stealth mode after two years of R&D, launching what they call their Trusted Identity solution, based on the principle of Zero Knowledge, citing call time, fraud prevention and regulatory compliance as key areas of “hard savings” while also pointing out the “soft benefits” associated with happier customers when issues are resolved quickly and on the first call, and the loyalty and increased share of wallet that follows.

“Verifying and authenticating a customer in a contact center using today’s methods typically takes 60-90 seconds but can take up to 2 1⁄2 minutes,” according to Journey. “Eliminating that alone can save as much as $3 a call, and even more depending on which 3rd party vendors you’re using. With today’s methods, enterprises still lose 2-3% of revenue to fraud. This is because real people fail the typical KBA process about 30% of the time, while fraudsters can beat the system 60% of the time. Money is walking out to the door at an alarming rate in yesterday’s suboptimal authentication processes.”

A few days after Journey’s first announcement, another Denver-based company, Eventus, a CX company that offers experience design, managed solutions, and their own technology platform (IntelligenceHub), announced they are going-to-market in partnership with Journey. Eventus serves large enterprises, working with a seasoned ecosystem of industry leaders (including Pega, Oracle, Genesys, and many more), and like Journey, aim to dramatically lower costs while improving CX.

Journey is a new partner, but the two companies have been working together behind the scenes to find ways to bring better identity security solutions into the marketplace, even as the contact center and CX industries continue to change dramatically, accelerating the value of innovation and automation given the new nature of distributed, WFH models.

Eventus will be bringing Journey’s Trusted Identity Platform to the market across all three lines of business (strategy and consulting, managed solutions, and technology innovations).

“Journey’s platform makes it possible to accurately verify the identity of a customer and exchange private information in a safe manner.  Not only is there a secure communications channel between the customer and the business, but personal data is only appropriately disseminated to the agents when absolutely required.  Fraud from both the customer side and the agent side is avoided,” said Greg Weber, CTO, Eventus. “Their solution empowers consumers and differentiates the brands who make it possible to dramatically reduce the time it takes to get their questions answered and problems solved. Their software and AI capabilities fit perfectly with our ongoing efforts to leverage automation and innovation to more intelligently orchestrate CX for significantly improved outcomes, lower costs, and stronger compliance.”

Journey eliminates the traditional tradeoffs companies face in customer authentication, confirming customer identity with 99.9999% accuracy in less than two seconds, enabling enterprises to interact and transact with their customers securely and simply.

The solution is architected to fundamentally solve the digital identity conundrum with a purpose-built highly secure network and a platform for enterprises to simultaneously solve for security, customer data privacy and an elegant customer experience.

“Our mission is to restore trust to every interaction between companies and their customers,” said Michael Frendo, PhD, and CTO of Journey. “We have an opportunity to rebuild trust eroded by the tension that exists between the desire to deliver a highly personalized and convenient experience, and the need to protect privacy and valuable data. Customer information should be a source of insights that illuminate customer service and make the customer’s journey easy and enjoyable, but until now we have not had a technology that can protect against adversaries, especially now that millions of employees and contact center agents are working from home. We are thrilled to partner with Eventus to bring our platform together with their offering to large enterprises seeking to differentiate their brands with intuitive, secure and intelligent interactions.”

Journey’s Trusted Identity Platform enables companies to conduct ultra-secure one-in-a-billion identity authentication in less than two seconds without ever directly accessing private information about a customer. Journey solves this challenge in a holistic way by enabling best-in-class identity solutions deployed from a platform that is orchestrated by an innovative patent-pending “zero-knowledge” network, which verifies information but never actually shows the personal data to an agent. The platform also works in concert with the existing identity, payment and transaction tools that companies have invested in, and it can be implemented in a matter of days to immediately transform customer interactions.

Journey’s fundamentally new approach has been proven to result in:

• 99.98% reduction in synthetic fraud, upending hacker economics
• Saving 30 – 120 seconds per call
• Saving at least $1 per call
• Increasing outbound right-party connect rates by up to 10x
• Enabling secure work from anywhere agents allowing flexible staffing models proven to increase retention rates
• Easy integration with existing identity, payment & transaction tools
• All-in savings on compliance, fraud, time, and operational efficiency can mean saving up to $25,000 per agent, per year.

Journey recently received two prestigious awards from Enterprise Connect in recognition of the company’s groundbreaking Trusted Identity Platform. The organization named Journey’s Trusted Identity Platform the winner of its Best of Enterprise Connect and Best Innovation in Customer Experience awards, which recognize major innovations that will have a significant impact on customer service and experience.

Originally published on Call Center Management