To BPO contact centers, every second an agent is available to spend with customers matters. Customer service is a crucial differentiator between firms, and even the most minor changes can significantly impact a BPOs brand. Having agents available to assist customers at all times is critical to staying competitive. That's why contact centers are constantly looking for solutions to help them reduce shrinkage and better serve their customers.
Shrinkage refers to the time agents are unavailable to handle customer interactions, despite being scheduled to do so. It occurs for various reasons, such as scheduled breaks, vacations, training sessions, meetings, agents showing up late– or even due to security friction. This means that if a contact center needs to be staffed to have 100 agents available and have experience the industry average shrinkage rate of 30%, management would need to schedule an additional 30 agents to meet demand.
Shrinkage can significantly impact a contact center's operations and ability to meet customer demand. Even small increases in shrinkage can result in longer wait times for customers, lower levels of service, and reduced agent productivity. As such, it's essential for contact centers to monitor and manage shrinkage to minimize its impact carefully.
That is why it is no surprise that contact centers and their customers are concerned with the additional security friction resulting from the changes in PCI v4.0.
PCI v4.0 will require everyone to authenticate when accessing a VPN, again to access the CDE, and again for all applications. It will also align with NIST standards of 15-minute time-outs and mandatory three-month credential rotations. Ultimately, without the proper multi-factor authentication in place, once PCI v4.0 standards take effect, agents will spend more time doing security challenges and reducing their ability to serve customers– increasing shrinkage.
Implementing continuous authentication is the only way to solve the shrinkage issue caused by stricter security requirements.
Twosense Continuous MFA was designed to do exactly this for BPO contact centers and their customers. Twosens’s cloud-based machine learning platform analyzes behavioral biometric data to learn who your users are, creating a unique profile for each user. Whenever a user passes an MFA challenge, each model continues to learn and adapt to changing behaviors. The more behavior is observed, the more confident Twosense can be that the user is who they claim to be. When the model is mature, Twosense can validate the user's identity and create a baseline of trust.
By eliminating agents from having to complete MFA challenges manually, Continuous MFA enables contact centers to maximize their agent's identity security without increasing friction and reducing its overall shrinkage rates. Automating the MFA challenge response and authenticating agents with passive behavioral biometrics significantly reduces the amount of time that agents are unavailable due to security. In addition to reducing shrinkage, Continuous MFA allows BPOs to improve their security posture and deploy PCI-compliant MFA.
