Mobilize your contact center to boost member data security and ensure positive customer experiences during digital transformation.
Practically all banking and financial services institutions are racing to digitalize. But, due to the very nature of their member-driven, not-for-profit business model, credit unions have unique digital transformation challenges.
Perhaps more than other financial institutions, containing costs while ensuring a positive, secure member experience (i.e., the customer experience, or CX) during a digital transformation is critical. The loss of even the smallest percentage of credit union members can have a dramatic impact.
Digitalization is an opportunity to streamline operations and better compete from the CX perspective. But every change also has the potential of introducing a new vulnerability upon which fraudsters can capitalize — especially when budgets are lean, and resources are scarce.
Maximizing the value of your contact center team by equipping them for the fight against fraud can supplement the efforts of IT and security departments. In credit unions that are striving to compete in this climate, every team member counts.
Minimizing risk on the front line With the current cyber and economic landscapes, managing CX, costs, and risks requires multiple perspectives to ensure all bases are covered.
In a Credit Union National Association magazine, an article on cyber hygiene suggests the following for reducing risk without breaking the bank:
Identify what matters through different types of agile audits.
Prepare for technology changes by cultivating champions throughout the organization.
Know your credit union better than anyone else – better than any attacker!
Digital transformation, like security, requires an organization-wide commitment. It involves every department, every employee, and external partners, too.
Contact center partners can and should support digitalization with security efforts. Due to their front-line perspective, they arguably know more about your members and outward-facing processes than any other team.
Are you leveraging credit union outsourcing to the full extent?
Role of the contact center in credit union digitalization Some credit unions worry they may create friction or deter members from using products and services if they add steps for security and validation as they digitalize.
As the team that often serves as the “gatekeeper” between businesses and their customers, VXI understands how the smallest change in operations can affect trust in the CX. In turn, we have embraced a balanced, zero-trust security model.
Within each financial services outsourcing agreement, we now include a dedicated fraud team to understand each program’s unique risks, develop preventative measures, audit regularly, and fine-tune agent training that factors those risks.
While many firms can help you with digitalization and security, your contact center partner has a unique CX-focused role to play. Your contact center team can:
Help you deliver the best, most secure member experience at each phase of the digital journey.
Help with transitions and testing by temporarily making up for features any technology solution lacks.
Prevent and detect fraud by authenticating members through manual, data-based, and automated means.
Apply speech recognition and voice-of-the-customer tools to monitor reactions to new processes.
Serve as a helpdesk for members and employees in the process of adopting new technologies.
Validate member and employee compliance and process adherence.
Build a risk register to capture all known ways that fraud manipulation can occur in the contact center.
Share best practices from across BFSI, as we work for other financial services clients.
Provide an extra layer of abuse tracking and auditing of customer-facing systems and teams — daily, monthly, and quarterly.
As the bridge between clients and their customers, and as a trusted partner, we have a responsibility to help our clients map where their member/customer data goes and who has access to it, while also placing guardrails for how that data is being used.
Must-have outsourced contact center security features Practically every new contact center outsourcing arrangement involves some digitalization or optimization.
At VXI, we have developed processes and tools to support clients and assist agents in ensuring compliance and continuity in the CX throughout the transition to new operating environments. Our proprietary, zero-trust suite of tools may be applied fully or customized for this purpose:
Intelligent Quality Automation Tool (IQAA) — IQAA ensures adherence and detects unauthorized or unusual agent or employee activity, such as putting a credit card number in Notepad.
Training Simulator™ — TSIM recreates real-life scenarios to optimize advisor performance, improve specific KPIs, help agents detect fraud, and deliver improvement feedback.PPRO – The PPRO coaching platform helps agents secure the CX while hitting KPIs and ensuring compliance to regulations.
At VXI, we handle unauthorized charges, customer ID checks and verifications, account takeovers and SIM card swapping, and foreign asset control issues and money transfers to prohibited countries for credit unions, credit card, and payment processing companies.
For every transaction — from account opening to account closing — VXI works actively with clients to develop internal and customer-facing processes to confirm that members are who they say they are and that they are authorized to avail of services.
A final thought… Credit unions are subject to a vast array of malicious activity and fraud attempts, ranging from member money laundering and identity theft to phishing, ransomware, and DDoS attacks. While most have dramatically ramped up information security measures, they may still fall behind other BFSI organizations.
One-dimensional, independent security methods are no match for fraudsters using dynamic techniques and sophisticated tools. Fraud prevention is not something one team holds responsibility for — every system, department, employee, and partner must be on defense — especially when digitalization efforts and member retention are top priority.
Whether your contact center provider uses your processes and technologies or their own, they have a unique front-line, cross-industry, CX-focused vantage point that may be beneficial to consider in the fight against fraud.
