VariLogiX Fights Fraud by Phone
By Anastasia Tubanos, theWHIR.com
August 3, 2006 — (WEB HOST INDUSTRY REVIEW) — Like many specialty service providers, telephony fraud prevention service provider VariLogiX (varilogix.com) began its days as a Web hosting provider offering a variety of services such as SSL certificates.
Constantly hit by fraud, however, VariLogiX invested its energy in creating FraudCall, an automated telephone service that verifies product orders. It was only a matter of time before the company shared its innovation with the entire Web hosting community.
After two years in the market, VariLogiX announced last week that it has launched version three of its flagship product, FraudCall. The tool is an automated service that places out-bound telephone calls to customers to verify their orders. The call is placed while a customer is still on a merchants’ Web site placing the order, so there is no delay with verification.
Using a FraudCall’s API, the merchants’ billing software sends a request to the service, which verifies the number format and, based on the service package, will rate the call using VariLogiX’s fraud information service. A call is then placed to the client, asking for their pin number. After the pin has successfully been entered, FraudCall asks for a voice signature on the order. Finally, a response is sent to the billing software so the order can continue. According to VariLogiX, FraudCall uses advanced telephony software, servers and switching networks to provide “real time” results.
James Ryan, VariLogiX’s president and founder says the updated version has many new features, including four new plans to choose from, lower call per pricing and the ability to add multiple profiles each with its own configuration settings. But Ryan says the new version is meeting specific customer requests with its live agent and unique text-to-speech feature.
“One of the things our clients were saying was that their customers had problems during their transactions either because there was a language issue and they didn’t understand the call, or the phones worked a little differently because it was coming in from an international location and unfortunately the customer would hang up and just forget about purchasing with our client,” says Ryan. “So, what we’ve done is put a text-to-speech feature where it passes specific words, like the company name and products, into a voice synthesizer so its easier to understand and doesn’t have that annoying robotic voice.
“We’ve also included a live agent connect, which allows customers that are having the issues to just say star 8 or star 1, or press it on their telephones, and connect straight to the merchant, where the merchant can actually talk to the customer and approve the transaction right there. With these new features the merchant doesn’t lose the customer, and the customer doesn’t abandon the order.”
Ryan says FraudCall 3 is very simple to use and is one of the only telephone confirmation services that is integrated into almost every major billing software provider, including ModernBill, SWsoft, Lpanel and MIVA Merchant. And although VariLogiX offers its product to Web hosting providers, it is working on enabling its clients to resell it as a value-added feature.
“A lot of large data center companies have a few sales people that they’re paying $15 an hour to make confirmation calls, and many of them aren’t placing the call as soon as the order goes through,” says Ryan. “But FraudCall calls the customer immediately while they’re still ordering on the Web site and it’s honestly just a better time to verify with them rather than calling three or four hours after the order has been placed, and the customer is gone. That method is just wasting the service provider’s manpower and money. It’s simply more cost-effective to use FraudCall. It costs companies $7 to $10 per customer just to have real people verify orders, and compared to ours that costs $1.25 per call, it’s just going to protect these businesses from the processing fees, especially charge backs. This is why people love this service.”
