OCBC Bank in Singapore has launched voice metrics and speech recognition in its contact center to improve the retail customer experience.
According to the bank’s head of consumer financial services Dennis Tan, the solutions launched reduce the time taken for customer verification, giving customers quicker access to services required. The voice biometric authentication replaces PINs, one-time passwords and security questions at the bank’s contact centre. Customers can use their voices as vocal passwords for authentication.
Voice biometrics was launched by OCBC in September last year to a targeted group of retail customers. With the technology, customers could use their voiceprints to authenticate requests for account balances, latest transactions and the status of deposited cheques.
Voice biometrics will be available to the bank’s retail customers in the fourth quarter of this year, with customers expected to be able to use their voiceprints to authenticate a majority of banking transactions.
To enrol their voiceprint, customers are asked to say a specific phrase, called a passphrase, three times. A passphrase is an explicit sentence crafted by OCBC Bank to be spoken by the customer into the system to capture the customer’s voice. The voiceprint is created using the spoken passphrase and stored in the system’s database. A voiceprint is not a recording of a voice but a digital representation of a person’s vocal characteristics, so it cannot be disguised and is not affected by emotion or a blocked nose.
To authenticate a banking transaction, the customer will be asked to say the passphrase that was used to enroll his or her voiceprint. If further verification is needed to confirm the customer’s initial vocal password is valid and is not a voice recording, the system will then ask the customer to say a different sentence from the enrolled passphrase. The customer’s voice is captured and is compared with the relevant stored voiceprint on the database. A verification result is then provided by the system. The authentication process is hassle-free and can be done in 15 seconds.
Speech recognition
OCBC Bank launched speech recognition at its contact center in April this year to all personal banking customers.
While voice biometrics enhances customer experience by replacing PINs, passwords and security questions, speech recognition replaces the need to select service options via the phone keypad. The deployment also reduces the number of steps needed to enter the options sequentially on the keypad to access a particular service. Speech recognition technology recognizes and understands a customer’s spoken request, thereby enabling the customer to access the required service faster and more accurately.
According to OCBC Bank, the top customer enquiries received via speech recognition are checking recent transactions and account balances, requests for fee waivers, and Internet Banking and statement enquiries. These requests amount to 30.4 per cent of all requests to the Contact Centre. The success rate of the speech recognition service has been extremely high, says OCBC Bank, with 90 per cent of customers having their spoken requests recognised by the system.