The number of credit and debit card payments being made in the UK each year has significantly increased over the past decade, the UK Cards Association reported that 15 billion transactions were made in 2015 with a value that amounted to around £660 billion (35% of the UK GDP in 2015). With the increasing rise in card payments payment security has taken more of a front seat in recent years, and rightly so.

However, there is still a bit of confusion around PCI DSS, many people don’t understand what it is and what implications it can have on them or their business. As a PCI DSS Tier 1 Service and Solutions Provider we have heard it all here at C3.

1. We don’t process enough payments to require to be compliant

Ever since the implementation of the newest PCI – PCI 3.2 – in 2016 there is no longer a minimum number of transactions that have to take place for a merchant to be required to be PCI compliant. This means that even if you process one card payment every year you still need to adhere to the standards and be fully compliant.

2. PCI only applies to e-commerce companies

Any company that stores, processes or transmits cardholder information, whether you have a shop in a physical location and use POS devices, process card payments online through your online store or offer a tele-billing service, PCI applies to you.

3. Masking numbers is enough

Many believe that hiding the whole credit or debit card number with the exception of the last 4 digits is enough when in fact it is not, this is only a small step in the PCI process. This only hides the full number on the payment screen so that, in a contact centre for example, the agent can’t see the number, it does not account for your network or system storing that information in a non-compliant manner elsewhere where it can be retrieved and decoded later.

4. Merchants are allowed to store any data

There are many business owners that think they have the right to store any and all of the data that they want to in order to aid their business. This violates PCI DSS as well as legislation regarding privacy, customers may not have given permission for their sensitive data to be stored. PCI states that unencrypted credit card numbers, CVV or CV2 numbers, PIN blocks, PIN numbers or Track 1 or Track 2 data cannot be stored under any circumstances. If anyone is found to have stored any of the above information they run the risk of facing serious consequences particularly if any data has been compromised, a security breach and all the costs that come with it could put a company out of business.

5. PCI is unreasonable

When it comes to the security of the sensitive information and data of your customers nothing is unreasonable. PCI DSS is a common security practice, it may be hard to understand for those who do not have large security or IT departments, but that is where C3 come in. We are fully accredited to provide a range of secure solutions to process credit and debit card payments via telephone, SMS and/or online

We have worked with some of the UK’s biggest charity events such as Comic Relief and Children in need to process thousands of secure payments per hour. We also work with many retailers, value added service providers and tele-billing organisations to develop PCI DSS Compliant smart payment applications.

The popularity of the cloud is ever increasing, through recent years the number of businesses adopting the cloud has continued to increase significantly. If businesses haven’t already migrated and moved their files, services and processes to the cloud it is more than likely that they are planning to. It is the same for contact centres too, it has become more and more common for the cloud to be used as a platform within a call centre setting, and why not? Here are just 4 advantages of the many that using the cloud can offer…

1. Cutting Costs

Setting up a physical contact centre is incredibly costly and time consuming, not every company has the resources to finance their own let alone maintain it. Contact centres can incur costs from thousands up to millions depending on their size and how many months or years of work go into working towards their opening. Not forgetting the utilities, salaries of every single worker and not just the agents, even the little things such as refreshments and other perishables that are essential to the daily workings of a contact centre. Introducing a virtual contact centre software system into the mix however can help you to cut down on a lot of these costs. Giving agents the ability and opportunity to work flexibly and even remotely and from home means you don’t need such a large premises to house every single member of staff. With the downsizing of your premises it means you’ll be saving on electricity and other utilities too.

2. Flexibility

As pointed out in the last section, migrating your contact centre activities to a platform in the cloud gives agents the opportunity to work from home or somewhere other than the office remotely. All of the files are accessible from anywhere because they’re all online when they’re in the cloud, everyone has access to everything they need while still maintaining the ability to add, log or save any files, details or data into the virtual system as well. With the need of having agents in a physical location eliminated it allows you to seek out more specialist agents. For example, if your centre needed to service German customers or you required someone with detailed knowledge of computers then you have a wider pool of talent to employ from compared to your surrounding area.

3. Scalability

Industries are incredibly varied and the needs, wants and requirements of the customers within those sectors equally differ, as a result the peak times in all of these different businesses are different too. For example, Christmas is a typical peak time for retailers where they usually have a lot more queries surrounding product issues at this time, and around admission and clearing time Universities see a rise in the number of people contacting them.

These peak times mean businesses need a lot more capacity to deal with their customer service during these periods and so need to scale up and employ more agents. This can become a costly effort however if you require so many more agents and equipment because you need to find somewhere for them to work and install and maintain equipment you might not need for the rest of the year. This financial strain can be mitigated with the help of the cloud. Any software and systems in the cloud are easily adapted to the requirements of the business, so when the business grows or temporary agents need to be taken on board any software can be altered to suit.

4. Customer Service Improvement

There has been major growth over recent years in using multiple channels to deliver great customer service so using multi-channel contact centre software in the cloud is a no-brainer. It allows you to streamline all incoming information from different channels such as Twitter, Facebook, email, telephone and even text messages into a manageable feed in a central location. Having all of this detailed information in one place allows agents to access all of the detail they need to be to deliver exceptional service to customers and support them to the best of their ability.

Find out more about or multi channel communication platforms for the cloud environment