Cashiers collecting your company’s money at point of sale, or call center operators editing customers’ data, are ongoing risks.
Within Retail POS environments, understanding cashier activities and effectively controlling actions such as credits, discounts or merchandise returns are vital. Management should be able to identify individual employee behavior undisguised by generic password log-ons or switching between store locations/cash registers. Behavioral problems should be traceable to store/shift/cash register/employee/manager level using biometric identity management, continuous authentication and logging. This should also contain problem areas and serve in reconciliation to ERP financials.
In customer service environments such as call centers, financial institutions or public sector service counters, the customer-facing employee will typically gain access to customers’ private information ranging from personal details, credit status, bank accounts, social security, financial ability, payment cards and more. This creates various fraud possibilities, and can be a threat to the organization without proper controls in place to deter opportunistic fraud. Intangible threats include privacy lawsuits, negative publicity and brand degradation. Organizations can ensure full tamper-proof audit trails are created by any access or change to customers’ data, using continuous biometric re-authentication of workers. Accountability will increase dramatically.
Point of Sale / Customer Service threat areas can include:
- Unauthorized cashier activity: credits, discounts, merchandise returns
- Cash reconciliation
- Inventory shrinkage
- Call center customer privacy
