“We deal with dozens of vendors, and Pindrop is quite literally one of the greatest vendors that I’ve ever worked with.” – Interactive Voice Response (IVR) Product Owner
Projecting ~$1.7M return on investment in the first year*
This utilities organization is a Fortune 100 company with +$30B in revenue, and one of America’s leading energy holding companies that strives to keep customer reliability and value at the forefront as it builds a ‘smarter energy future’. This goal places customer service and experience at the forefront, which is why they sought a solution that could help authenticate genuine customers and filter out those that could be fraud.
About the energy company
The company ranked among the top 100 largest companies in the United States in 2024, is a Fortune 100 company with +$30B in revenue, and one of America’s leading energy holding companies. The organization services +8M electric and nearly 2M gas utility customers across the U.S., collectively owning ~+54K megawatts of energy capacity.
*from 11/2024-3/2025
Challenges
For a utility company, addressing fraud was somewhat rare, especially in comparison to an industry like banking that proactively seeks ways to reduce fraud. The team was addressing ~ 20 fraud issues per day, or ~1800 per month. Fraud issues that customers called in with were largely regarding direct scams; rarely did the team hear about cases where a fraudster called directly to access a customer’s account. While the team was aware of robotic voices attempting to access their IVR, it was difficult to decipher if this behavior was fraudulent or not. Fraud mitigation was a huge goal for the organization. Before Pindrop, this energy company did not have profile-building methods or matching mechanisms in place for customer authentication. Due to the lack of clarity on when or if fraud was happening, they suspected that their organization could be relatively ‘open’ to fraudulent behavior.
“Fraud mitigation was a huge goal for our organization, something that we viewed as an opportunity to further safeguard our customers.”
– IVR Product Owner
An additional complexity to their business is the +800K customers who do not have Social Security numbers. This posed a challenge for the organization, as they did not have a good way to service this set of customers directly in the IVR.
Before Pindrop, these customers could do only two things in the IVR:
Make payments
Report outages
These actions covered only a small percentage of the self-service options available to customers in their IVR.
Because of these challenges, the customer wanted a solution to help modernize their call center security framework, alert them to potential fraud, and help reduce the authentication burden on their genuine customers.
Goals
This customer had three initial goals in mind as they sought a new solution:
Identify and authenticate more customers in the IVR
Enable specialists to clearly understand the risk of a caller as they come through to agents, and reduce average handle time
Maintain an ‘industry-leading’ IVR that deploys the most cutting-edge tools to improve customer satisfaction
With these goals in mind, the customer wanted to proactively detect and mitigate fraud instead of reacting to events on a passive, case-by-case basis. Additionally, the IVR Product Owner and his team wanted a more comprehensive view of risk across the call center.
Before Pindrop® Solutions
The organization was using an out-of-the-box solution for authentication that they wanted to build from to improve their customer experience, lower average handle time (AHT), and streamline the efficiency and efficacy of their authentication process overall. Before Pindrop, the customer had a 73% authentication rate in the IVR. Through the years, they were able to get this number up to approximately 76%. Their existing point solution provided some insight as to force transfers out of the IVR, payment success, and account balance success, but these details were limited. Additionally, the customer was tracking AHT on a daily basis, which was an important metric for them. For example, every minute an agent spent on the phone equated to +$1 in cost to the organization. Net Promoter Score (NPS), which measures customer loyalty by looking at their likelihood of recommending a given business, was another metric that they tracked—a lot of their growth solutions are focused on improving this metric.
“On average, 225K callers per month were asked for their Social Security number using the legacy authentication process. That was cut by 55% month-over-month after Pindrop.”
– IVR Product Owner
Before Pindrop, the customer relied on the agent getting at least 3 Knowledge-Based Authentication questions (KBA) questions from a customer. Every customer who came through the IVR to an agent had to be fully authenticated. There was no situation where a customer was partially authenticated to help the agent work faster. Therefore, authentication was happening twice, which was both a time-consuming and expensive process.
Pindrop internal data corroborates that KBA, a form of verification that uses personal information from public records, is not effective as a security mechanism. After analyzing 2.5K fraud calls across 10 financial institutions, Pindrop data conveys that fraudsters successfully pass KBA 53% of the time on average, with success rates ranging from 9% to as high as 90%.
The existing solution and authentication methods were lacking an efficient process for catching fraud or authenticating genuine customers quickly, and by extension, improving customer experience.
Why Pindrop
Timing
The Pindrop® Passport solution came together at the right time with the organization’s natural language IVR. The natural language IVR was the perfect blend of voice authentication and other features that Passport provides, which made it a perfect fit. Pindrop® Passport provides a multifactor authentication solution that helps contact centers quickly authenticate callers within their IVR system and at the agent, allowing agents to focus on serving genuine customers.
What did Pindrop® Solutions deliver?
“The increase in authentication that Pindrop® Passport provided blew us away. Pindrop® Passport was able to add 2-4% points in different areas of the IVR that completely surprised us.” — IVR Product Owner
The customer went into the project with relatively low expectations; they were proud of their existing IVR and the capabilities it enabled, as well as the flexibility their team had to implement enhancements whenever necessary. Which is why when the Pindrop solution added 2-4% points of increased authentication with Passport, it blew them away.
In Q1 of 2025, the customer had leveraged the Passport solution to enroll 1.4M unique customers, authenticate 7.9M calls, and identify nearly 100K (88,000) calls as ‘high risk’. Additionally, the number of callers already enrolled who received a ‘green’ profile match was 3.1M, meaning those callers could bypass legacy authentication methods.
Assuming a conservative 1% lift in profile match in the IVR, this equates to approximately $9 in savings per contained call. Additionally, the AHT savings in profile match is estimated to be $728K, for a total cost savings of $1.7M in approximately six months. This is a substantial return on investment that directly impacts the customer’s bottom line while simultaneously improving their key metrics of customer satisfaction.
The team also leveraged Passport to allow for additional self-service options for callers who do not have an SSN or TIN, and then passed that information to an agent for faster handle time. This points to an increase in IVR containment of about 1.4%, or $702K in containment savings in just one quarter.
Additionally, the company’s NPS increased +1.7pts from Sept 2024 to Oct 2024, and another +3.4 points from Oct 2024 to Nov 2024. The organization’s Nov 2024 score of +65.2 was the highest it had been since July 2023.
Business impact of Pindrop® Solutions
Enhanced customer experience
Once the Pindrop technology was implemented, the organization immediately saw their authentication rates shoot up by several percentages. For example, before Pindrop® Passport, they had ~225K callers per month who were asked for their Social Security number. The Passport solution cut this by 55%, meaning 100K customers every month were now in a better position to leverage the IVR self-service capabilities, which made for shorter wait times, fewer callers for agents to service directly, and better customer satisfaction for customers who could now service themselves.
Operational efficiency
This transformation created a cascade of positive impacts:
Shorter wait times for customers
Reduced call volume for agents to handle directly
Higher customer satisfaction scores for customers who can service themselves
Projected Year 1 ROI of approximately $1.7M (on an annualized basis)
Expanded service capabilities
Most significantly, the customer leveraged Pindrop® Passport to enable additional self-service options for the more than 800,000 customers who do not have SSNs or TINs. This previously underserved segment went from having access to only two basic functions (making payments and reporting outages) to enjoying the organization’s full range of self-service capabilities, while maintaining high security standards.
Measurable results
The evidence points toward a first-quarter increase in IVR containment of about 1.4%, translating to a significant reduction in AHT. With every minute on the phone costing the customer more than $1, this efficiency gain delivers substantial ongoing savings while simultaneously improving their core metrics of customer satisfaction and NPS.
Security coupled with customer satisfaction
By implementing Passport, Pindrop’s multifactor authentication solution, this energy customer exceeded their aspirations for building an industry-leading IVR that both protects their customers and delivers an exceptional experience, proving that security and customer satisfaction can effectively go hand-in-hand.
*On an annualized basis