Vonage and PCI Pal: A Payments Partnership for Contact Centers
More and more organizations are recognizing contact centers as an opportunity to boost their customer retention and revenue growth. But they face a challenge — how to blend customer experience and securing customer payments. Let’s take a closer look.
The Challenge
Consumer expectations for multi-contact channels are becoming more of the norm in the contact center space. This in turn requires a robust payment and compliance strategy to provide seamless payment solutions that can alleviate friction and improve the customer experience.
This blend of security and CX is no longer an afterthought; rather, it’s competitive “table-stakes” for companies to serve their customer base and develop contact center opportunities.
Vonage has been a long-standing, integrated partner of PCI Pal to provide market-leading, proven payment and compliance solutions to its global contact center customer base. Through the PCI Pal Agent Assist and Digital solutions, Vonage-supported agents can take payments from customers securely, whether onsite or remote, without exposing the infrastructure or the agent to any sensitive data — all while enhancing the customer experience.
The Solution
PCI Pal Agent Assist uses DTMF (dual-tone multi-frequency) masking technology, as well as speech recognition, to provide companies with a secure way of handling payments by phone without bringing their environments into the scope of the Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard (PCI DSS).
PCI Pal’s patented technology integrates with the call flow and, at the point of payment, intercepts any keypad tones or speech from the customer. This keeps the contact center agent from hearing or seeing the card data — all they see are asterisks on the screen. The customer and the agent can still converse throughout the process, but sensitive card data — the PAN and the CSV — are prevented from reaching the agent or the organization, drastically reducing the scope of PCI compliance.
What’s more, the integration is seamless, so agents don’t need to switch between screens and can offer a high standard of customer experience, effortlessly.
PCI Pal Digital lets organizations take payments efficiently via digital engagement channels such as webchat, SMS, social media, and email.
The Impact
The Vonage and PCI Pal partnership has seen organizations in utilities, retail, healthcare, financial services, and other verticals drastically improve the agent, customer, and business experience. We’ve seen companies establish a competitive CX edge by putting their customers’ data security at the forefront, while future-proofing the business.
In addition, the organizations we work with are seeing an increase in payment success rates through first-contact resolution, as well as a drop in average call handling times (AHT). Agents have confidence in their tools and are able to focus on the experience rather than sensitive payment data entry. Tools such as pause-and-resume can be retired, and complete calls can be recorded without the risk of data being compromised.
In a world of complex systems and processes, there’s great value in simplified solutions. Solutions that helped reach compliance two years ago are not the solutions that can take your contact center to the next level.
PCI DSS and other data regulations continue to push organizations to entirely remove sensitive PII and cardholder data from the scope of PCI compliance. With the PCI Pal suite of solutions through Vonage, your organization can scale at the rate you need it to, and your contact center can become a customer-focused part of the business.
Next Steps
Want to know more about providing a superior customer experience while securing customer payments with 1 PCI DSS, the highest level of compliance for your contact center? Contact our team to discuss compliance solutions today.
