Whether it is PCI DSS, GDPR, HIPAA or any one of a multitude of regional or sector-specific standards, we often view regulatory compliance as a burden, yet another hoop to jump through and a cost to our business, not a benefit.
Should we not be looking more positively at such standards? After all, most of these have been put in place to protect the customer and surely protecting your customers should be a good thing, right?
Over the next ten years, payment card fraud losses are expected to reach $17 billion. That’s nearly 9 cents per $100 spent. It is therefore not surprising that consumers are increasingly nervous when providing personal payment details, especially via a contact center or over digital channels.
Focus on building trust
Where in the past many organizations have viewed PCI DSS compliance as a tick in the box for their payment provider, there is now a change in emphasis. More organizations are seeing PCI DSS compliance as a way of demonstrating that they take payment security seriously and use this to build trust with their customers.
Over three quarters of US IT professionals and security leaders now plan to transition to 2024’s updated PCI DSS framework to keep their customers’ card information safe, and their reputation undamaged.
PCI DSS is not new; it was first introduced in December 2004. It has gone through various iterations over the years to cater for new and emerging risks and changes in the way consumers want to make payments and organizations want to take these. We are now on PCI DSS 4.0 and this is a very comprehensive and well respected standard.
What this means for organizations is that there is no need to reinvent the wheel or to develop their own policy procedures and practices for secure payments; they can follow a well-established framework which is valued by both the payment industry and consumers alike.
The secret is descoping PCI DSS from your contact center
The thought of changing work practices and systems in your contact center or within your customer-facing teams to ensure PCI DSS compliance can be daunting. The cost and effort of changing legacy systems to follow the standard for securing payment information may be prohibitive. There may be significant resistance from your contact center to change or add further steps to the process of taking a payment.
This is why organizations should not be looking to embed PCI DSS within their contact centers, but to remove their contact center from the scope of PCI DSS, while still achieving the same benefits.
Specialist secure payment solutions, such as PCI Pal, enables you to capture customer payment details in a secure cloud that is fully PCI DSS level 1 compliant and for none of this sensitive information to enter your contact center systems or be exposed to your agents.
Such an approach enables you to secure and streamline how you take payments from customers. You are able to allow customers to pay through a secure link, using masked DTMF tones or leveraging advanced speech recognition. Regardless of the option used, none of this information is seen or heard by your agents, nor enters your contact center environment.
Instant compliance, immediate benefits
By taking this approach of utilizing a secure payment solution, you remove the need to make changes to your contact center, ensuring that the scope of PCI DSS compliance is contained within your specialist application that is fully compliant and hosted in a secure cloud.
The benefits you gain are immediate:
- Instant compliance
You avoid falling foul of not being PCI DSS compliant in the way you take payments in your contact center or across customer-facing teams. - Reduce risk
By ensuring that sensitive payment information from customers is captured and processed in a highly secure and compliant manner, significantly reducing the risk of a damaging data breach. - Instill customer confidence
By demonstrating to them that you take the security of their payment information seriously and fully adhere to what is seen as best practice, PCI DSS. - Simplify the payment process
By utilizing a proven interface and process flow of capturing customer payments, removing the friction and frustration from the process. - Offer more payment choice
Aligning to changing customer preferences of how they want to make a payment, enabling them to use cards, digital wallets or even pay by bank, and to do this over the phone, through automated self-service or by link.
By taking this approach to PCI DSS, organizations can leverage compliance to drive an advantage, not only to their business, but also their customers.
If you would like to discover more about how PCI Pal can help you streamline, secure and ensure every payment is compliant, then simply reach out to our team.
