The Company
Founded over 130 years ago, this major British multinational retailer has its headquarters in London, and specializes in selling clothing, homewares and food products.
With contact center staff located in South Africa, the team handles inquiries and also transacts payments for goods. The retailer, in partnership with its contact center technology partner Capita, embarked on a change project to overhaul its payment security and PCI compliance solution.
The Compliance Challenge
Previously the team had been using a ‘pause and resume’ method when taking payments; upon requesting a payment, agents would open a payment browser, pause the call recording, manually input the card payment information and check-out, before resuming call recording on completion.
As a Level 1 merchant, the organization must meet the most stringent requirements of the Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard (PCI DSS).
The retailer was therefore keen to implement a more robust and seamless centralized solution, which would descope payment card data from its contact center environment. It wanted to move away from ‘pause and resume’, in order to minimize risk of customers’ card payments being recorded during the transaction process.
The Solution
As a partner of PCI Pal, Capita recommended PCI Pal Agent Assist, which would deliver against these requirements.
PCI Pal Agent Assist is founded on dual-tone multi-frequency (DTMF) masking technology, so when a telephone payment is initiated, contact center agents cannot see, hear, or record customers’ payment card details during the course of their conversation. The caller simply inputs the card information using the telephone keypad or via speech.
This is particularly beneficial for securing telephone payments handled by contact center agents who are working from home. The technology ensures a smoother customer experience because they can carry on speaking to agents throughout the transaction process. It also reduces agent handling time because, where necessary, agents can provide guidance during the course of the call. Additionally, PCI Pal’s PCI compliance solutions descope the card data from the merchant’s environment.
600 user licenses are currently active, allowing 50 simultaneous payment sessions at any one time.
Instead of operating via a payment gateway, the retailer used an inhouse card tokenization system, which integrates with its web service. PCI Pal integrated to this system, and also supported the retailer to migrate payment providers, updating the payment flows.
Download the success story to read more on how PCI Pal allowed this organization to achieve and maintain PCI compliant contact center payments. Discover how the flexibility of our cloud-based solutions ensures a seamless agent experience and a customer journey that remains consistent, even when other business processes change.
