Contact centers can handle huge volumes of contact with clients and prospects. Maximizing efficiency & security are crucial for companies looking to capitalize on the future of work and digital transformation. Yet most centers are stuck guessing who’s calling, why they’re calling, and how they’d like to be treated. Great strides have been made with techniques like voice biometrics, personality-based routing, selective recording and agent masking – but these improvements require complex implementations, have UX limitations, are in the crosshairs of a wave of upcoming privacy regulations, and are still treatments rather than cures. 

Solving these problems requires a paradigm change in how customer information is verified, shared, and managed. That’s where Journey’s patent-pending Zero Knowledge Identity Network and suite of verified communication solutions come in. 

The company was co-founded by Brett Shockley who is CEO and he is one of the most accomplished players in the contact center space. He was CEO, president and co-founder of Spanlink Communications since 1988 and has worked at Cisco and Avaya as well as a number of board positions at important industry companies.

Brett has brought together a great team of past innovators such as Michael Frendo, the first Cisco VoIP employee, Mark Bakies and Todd Parenteau who was a co-founder at Spanlink. His son, Alex is a digital marketing whiz and works at the company as well.

Journey is looking to dramatically increase the accuracy of customer identification while reducing time.

The way this is done is via a mobile phone – ideally with an app installed – but Alex explains this is not 100% necessary as voice biometrics can be a backup way of authenticating.

The camera on the smartphone coupled with the phone’s built-in authentication like Face ID can be used together with 3rd party biometric authentication clouds to ensure the person is who they say they are.

Journey works without an app installed but if it is, it is like the caller is using TSA or Clear to bypass the long security line; they get through the process more quickly.

Alex Shockley

We are making the mobile device a full fledged partner in this process.

Brett Shockley

The current knowledge-based access solutions (KBA) can take a minute to work – mother’s maiden name, favorite city and other information takes time to get from the caller and it takes a lot of time.

We recently wrote about political campaign cybersecurity where we discussed pretexting – or using information about a person to impersonate them via phone. Anyone who was part of the OPM hack is at risk as is most everyone these days. This past Memorial Day, we reported about a billion records were compromised. The people affected are all at risk of being impersonated. It shows why KBA gets less effective by the day.

Aside from authentication, the system also provides intelligent risk assessment and agent-to-agent transfer of trust which means customers will not have to answer security questions repeatedly. There are also branded and dynamic precall notifications which show up on your screen as well as in-app data based routing and compliance with GDPR, PCI, etc.

In the real world -when all goes perfectly, the system works as follows:

1. The bank sends you a fraud alert on your phone via the app.
2. The user uses Face ID for authentication.
3. The user is presented with notification details.
4. The consumer can click a button to be contacted – with the implication the call will take place quickly.
5. The consumer can also schedule the call for later if needed.
6. When the call takes place, no authentication is needed as it has happened already,
7. A secure data channel is now established and there is no need to enter a credit card number.
8. A 3-digit security code may be asked for and entered.

If the user does not respond to the initial notification, they can still receive a call, then open the app and authenticate during the call.

If the user calls, they can still be asked to authenticate via the app.

Since the identity of the user is rapidly established, Journey is also able to provide rich contextual information regarding the caller quickly so the agent can be better prepared for the call and make it far more personal and engaging.

The contact center is at the center of a war, with the attackers being consumers, hackers, compliance organizations, CPOs and CSOs. The latter three could even be at odds as best security practices and concepts like blockchain run foul of GDPR. Consumers want to access the call center more quickly, and hate all the questions while hackers want to break in via impersonation. The last three want optimal identity verification and security, no matter how long it takes. Journey.ai is looking to help the contact center make a truce with these competing needs while enabling the call center to be more productive and efficient.

Where do organizations go to learn more? The world’s only Future of Work Expo (collocated with the ITEXPO #TechSuperShow) of course. Feb 12-14, 2020 in Fort Lauderdale, Florida.