A leading North American retail enterprise, combining wholesale distribution and retail operations, uses imper.ai to verify every employee who calls its outsourced help desk for a password reset. Once a caller is verified, the account is unlocked or the password is reset directly in Active Directory.
- Industry: Wholesale & retail
- Employees: about 40,000 (46,836 Active Directory accounts covered)
- Workforce: corporate staff plus frontline employees in stores, distribution centers and transportation
- Use case: password reset through an outsourced help desk
Challenge
Help desk services are delivered by an external provider whose agents handle employee password-reset calls. Those agents have no personal familiarity with the workforce, so confirming who is really on the line was the weakest link in the reset flow, and exactly the gap that help desk social-engineering attacks target.
The workforce makes it harder. Many frontline employees work without a corporate desk, and some use unmanaged devices, so the usual remote checks don’t apply to a large part of the people calling in.
Solution
With imper.ai, every caller’s identity is verified before a reset is approved. External agents follow a consistent, auditable verification step instead of relying on guessable personal details, so the provider can serve office and frontline employees safely and at scale.
The verification is fitted into the existing help desk flow. When the caller is verified, the account is unlocked and the password reset directly in Active Directory, with no extra hand-off for the agent.
Results from three months in production
- 7,888 reset requests, about 2,629 a month, across 46,836 accounts
- 6,705 successful password resets (85%), resolved as verified self-service resets, cutting manual help desk work by 85%
- 8 requests matched to known attack groups by imper.ai’s analyst services
