Cybersecurity pros have an unenviable task: helping businesses mitigate risk and keep consumer data safe, all in the midst of a continually evolving threat landscape. Yet even in the face of daily news stories of data breaches, they manage to spot some silver linings. When it comes to digital security, each year brings a bit of good along with the bad, and cybersecurity professionals celebrate the former while reminding us we need to be constantly improving if we want to protect our customers and our companies. A look back in the rearview shows 2021 was no different. The bad: by the end of September, the U.S. had already seen more data breaches than all of 2020. Even more concerning, a 2021 Forrester survey of individuals responsible for implementing enterprise passwordless authentication, a proven cybersecurity measure that helps defend against these breaches, showed adoption is lagging with half of the respondents less than three months into the process. The silver lining: that same Forrester survey revealed businesses are taking steps to combat fraud with more than two-thirds of respondents in the process of adopting passwordless authentication for employees or partners. This uptick in businesses deploying passwordless authentication demonstrates their comfort embracing an increasingly common trend in identifying and authenticating individuals with high levels of accuracy, while also greatly improving the customer experience: voice biometrics. Most newer smartphones and laptops feature face recognition and fingerprint scanning tools, which has pushed biometric authentication out of dystopian sci-fi literature and into the hands of millions. Such passwordless authentication methods are far superior and more secure than their knowledge-based and token-based authentication predecessors, which are compromised when a fraudster gains access to either. We’re taught in grade school biology that each human’s fingerprints are unique, which has led them to become a highly secure authentication method. But we may have forgotten another biological truism -- our voices are also uniquely ours, a characteristic highly coveted by security professionals and, increasingly, customer support teams fielding countless inbound calls in places like contact centers. While the applications of voice biometrics are myriad, it is finding swift adoption in contact centers which, due to the large volume of calls and personal data they manage, are frequent targets of fraudsters’ attacks and of customers’ frustrations. Contact centers have been under significant pressure over the past two years, amplified by the shift of many of their agents to remote work and by the overall uptick in customer support calls. Key performance indicators (KPIs) important to contact centers have been trending in the wrong direction as a result: average abandonment rate, average talk time, average handle time (AHT), and average speed of answer are all moving backward, per a recent study my company issued. Customers suffer most, and while there is no single culprit, some of this decline can be mitigated through improved security measures that expedite authentication through self-service automation, without compromising (and to the contrary, often improving) security and the overall customer experience. Further details are posted on OUR FORUM.