ID-Telephony -- Telephone Password Reset

Overview:

ID-Telephony® is a turn-key telephone user interface for the P-Synch® password reset system. It enables organizations to quickly and inexpensively offer self-service password reset to users over a telephone, without making costly changes to existing telephone switching infrastructure.

ID-Telephony is appropriate for users who forgot or disabled their primary workstation login. It also enables mobile and work-at-home users to resolve connectivity issues without calling the help desk.

Features:

An organization's existing help desk ACD (automatic call distribution) system is configured to transfer phone calls relating to password reset, intruder lockout or RSA token management problems from the main help desk phone number to a turn-key ID-Telephony server.

When ID-Telephony receives a phone call, it prompts users to select a language, indicate the type of problem, authenticate themselves and resolve their own problem. ID-Telephony allows users to reset their own passwords on one or more systems, to clear intruder lockouts on one or more of their own accounts and to manage their own RSA SecurID token.

ID-Telephony authenticates callers using Q-A (Question-and-Answer) data stored in P-Synch user profiles or using a two-factor token (e.g., SecurID token or another hardware device). An optional biometric voice print verification engine is also available for ID-Telephony, enabling organizations to authenticate callers by comparing a prompted voice sample to characteristics of a user's voice, stored on file.

Caller authentication data used by ID-Telephony may be periodically imported into P-Synch from another system or may be collected in the course of a managed P-Synch user enrollment, with e-mail reminders to users followed up by users authenticating to a P-Synch web page with their network password and filling in their personal data. Voice print samples can also be enrolled using e-mail prompts to users and user authentication to the P-Synch web application, with a telephone used only for collecting voice samples from web-authenticated users.

ID-Telephony can be configured to support users who speak multiple languages, by recording multiple versions of each voice prompt.

The call flow implemented by ID-Telephony is fully customizable:

The user interface can be uni-lingual or multi-lingual.
Users may be identified by a numeric representation of their alpha-numeric network login ID, or by a numeric identifier such as an employee number.
Callers may be required to reset all of their passwords, or allowed to choose a single password to reset.
New passwords may be randomly generated by P-Synch, or entered by users using a touch-tone keypad.
Users may be given the option to clear an intruder lockout without changing passwords or may always be required to reset passwords.
New passwords may be pre-expired or may be usable until the normal expiration interval passes.

ID-Telephony can integrate with any existing telephony infrastructure. To match ID-Telephony to a given corporate PBX system, an appropriate Intel Dialogic telephony card is chosen. Dialogic cards are available for analog and digital phone systems and range from single-line to 32 phone lines per card. Dialogic cards may be sourced from Hitachi ID or from telephony hardware suppliers.

ID-Telephony may be installed on the same physical server as P-Synch or on its own Windows/Intel servers, with the addition of one or more Intel Dialogic telephony boards. Multiple ID-Telephony servers can integrate with multiple P-Synch servers.

ID-Telephony need not be co-located with P-Synch. Communication between ID-Telephony and P-Synch is carried by a single, encrypted TCP/IP socket. As a result, it is possible to deploy ID-Telephony servers in multiple locations and integrate them with a single cluster of P-Synch servers, securely connecting over WANs, the Internet and/or firewalls.

Benefits:

ID-Telephony enables mobile users, work-at-home users and users who have been locked out of their primary workstation login to resolve their own problem without calling the help desk.

ID-Telephony is an easy-to-deploy solution for telephone access to self-service password resets. In organizations that do not have a pre-existing IVR infrastructure, or in those where modifying IVR call logic is complex or expensive, ID-Telephony is an attractive alternative, as it requires only minimal changes to existing phone switching infrastructure.