When it comes to protecting your entire organisation from fraudsters, ensuring the contact centre is secure is a top priority. For a fraud prevention approach to be most effective, the key is to spot fraudulent activity in its early stages, before any transactions take place.
If you’re unsure why, we’ve a blog on this that covers the full range of fraudulent activities carried out in the contact centre and the impact this can have on the whole organisation and beyond. You can find that here.
On the other hand, if you’re clear on how fraudsters target the IVR and contact centre agents, but would like to know more about how to tackle it, read on.
Key considerations
Ahead of putting in place any treatment strategies, there are certain points that organisations should consider up front to ensure they put themselves in the best position to detect fraudsters:
- Fraudsters often use withheld numbers to avoid detection. The customers we work with confirm that this is the case in more than half of fraudulent calls. The ability to link withheld calls from the same individual is key to tracking the impact of repeat fraudsters.
- Fraudsters reuse the same phone number(s) for multiple attacks across multiple accounts or organisations, so maintaining a denylist of phone numbers associated with fraudsters can help to identify repeat offenders.
- Fraudsters have behavioural patterns that can give away their intent, such as lots of short calls into an IVR. They will also be calling about several accounts, rather than just one.
- Potentially the most powerful insight an organisation can have when attempting to prevent fraud is knowledge of whether a suspicious number is on another organisation’s denylist, and any other details another organisation might have about this caller.
To get some proof about the kinds of fraudulent activity our customers see in their contact centres, see our sector case studies.
Data visibility is essential
Keeping the above in mind, to effectively detect and treat fraud at the earliest possible stage, fraud professionals need access to the right data, including visibility of the following data points:
Call metadata: Core metadata – or call signalling data – about the call such as the start/end time, phone number used and dialled number
IVR data: Data about the route that a caller attempted to take through an IVR, which account holder they targeted and what they ended up doing.
Agent call data: Details about what happened on the agent answered call such as call recording and agent notes
CRM data: Data about the customer, their account including recent transactions
Armed with this information, you’re in great shape to put the right treatments and processes in place to protect your customers and prevent fraudsters exploiting your contact centres. You’ll find a lot more information on what this might look like in this best practice guide.
And don’t forget, if you’re interested in discovering the types of insight some of our customers discovered when they monitored calls and analysed the above datasets from their contact centre, have a look at some of our sector case studies.
For more stories like this, and to keep up to date with Smartnumbers’ news, webinars and events, subscribe to our newsletter.
