Background
The Company provides a wide range of engineering, construction, and other services to the telecommunications and utility industries. They have a core team of staff, and many short-term contracts people, all of whom need access to the company’s internal networks.
Customer Requirement
The company initially worked with ValidSoft when it had a Five9 cloud contact solution that was used to authenticate callers against their previously recorded biometric voice print. Thanks to the success of that solution, the company asked ValidSoft to migrate their user base from a simple IVR-based solution using Five9 contacts to a full Identity Access Management (IAM) solution provided by Okta. In this latter solution, the company employee logs in via their employee ID and is then prompted to repeat the fixed phrase that they also used to enroll. ValidSoft’s cloud-based voice biometric solution then compares the biometric voice print of this phrase against that recorded during enrollment. The result is returned to the Okta IAM which then provides the user with corporate intranet access.
The company has a two-tier workforce comprised of a mainly office-based permanent part and a more transient, field-based part. In the latter case, most communications take place via mobile, whereas in the former, the desktop pc is the most likely access solution. Both the original and the Okta solutions must consider the different sources of speech and other variables such as external noise.
ValidSoft Solution
ValidSoft extended its existing solution to the company in several ways. A migration exercise took place re-mapping the existing voiceprints to an ID supplied by Okta, which offers increased security. The company chose to also take advantage of some improvements in voice biometric technology and apply utterance verification to ensure that the speaker enrolled with the correct phrase. The company retained a recording of all enrolments for their own purposes (this is unnecessary for the ValidSoft solution) and a decision was made to re-enroll all users on file as part of the exercise.
As part of an Okta Identity Access Management solution, ValidSoft has a different role to play in that they hold more details of the user and are responsible for a greater part of the authentication process, and are now visible as part of the user-facing front-end.
Probably the biggest challenge in this project has been the requirement to support the company’s transient workforce who are largely non-native speakers, which has been achieved using the out-of-the-box solution, proving the language-agnostic capabilities of the solution.
Benefits
The initial solution that ValidSoft supplied to the company fits into the classic call center requirements looking for reduced agent hold time for authentication combined with an increase of security by moving away from passwords and other knowledge-based authentication methods. When the company chose to continue with ValidSoft for their migration to a full IAM solution, they clearly understood the advantages of voice biometrics, especially applied to their primarily non-native-speaking workforce. The company has benefitted from over 3 years of call center voice biometrics and has used that experience to move forward into a more complex but much more secure IAM, bringing ValidSoft with them to supply the biometric components and more.
