Payment Card Security – How Businesses Can Protect Their Customer Privacy?

The need for protecting their personal information for every business is as crucial as other operations of the business. Where ever it may be kept, personal data always remains on high risk level, whether stored in systems or mobile phones. Every business makes the use of credit and debit cards to perform any transaction online and in most of the other real transactions as well. For contact centers, the Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard (PCI DSS) requires them to safely secure a customer’s card information and ensure protection against any fraudulent. Thus, for the very reason of PCI compliance recording, there are tools with features of advanced control over privacy and security design of multi-tiered along with end-to-end capabilities for multimedia encryption.

The regulations for security of payment cards requires PCI compliance recording by every contact center so as to ensure protected handling of the sensitive information and thus, making sure there is no identity theft. The risk of identity theft could come from any source, whether from leakage of information by an employee or any data hacker. As per the regulated standards, call centers are required to ensure enhanced data security of the card-holder customers including procedures like software designing, security management policies and other critical protective measures. These measures are compulsorily applied to any business that processes payment data. According to the PCI compliance recording, certain portion of the cardholder information shall not be stored even if it is assured to be stored in the most secured way.

Thus, to ensure cent percent trust of the customers on contact centers so that their card information is not leaked, there are certain tools and systems that call centers need to install and implement. The first and foremost factor to be ensured is the privacy control. Tools and software make sure certain portion of the call recording is omitted that contains sensitive authentication data. The recording is automatically paused when passage of sensitive data takes place from customer to agent. To add to this, every agent of the call center gets a unique username and password for extra security. Furthermore, these tools are designed with multi-tiered solutions that segregate sensitive data into the access control levels that are controlled by a network firewall. Apart, these tools and software come with the end-to-end multimedia encryption capabilities that come as an added benefit for record of interactions. It ensures that the data recorded is encrypted at the real time and remains encrypted all the time, whether stored or transferred further.

At the internal level, every call center is expected to define their own set of policies to ensure safety of the sensitive data of the customers. These policies shall be defined keeping in mind all the laws and regulations formulated in this regard and remaining PCI compliant. After a set of policies are defined, the same shall also be passed on to the customers to gain their trust. In case, any third party gains access to the sensitive data of the customer, the company shall take the responsibility. Being broad while listing the Customer Private Policy is always advisable. This comes handy when an unanticipated event, such as a merger or acquisition, takes place and the company is forced to hand over all the data to the Government. The advanced features offered by the security ensuring tools and software make the environment of any call center PCI compliant. Thus, spending some extra bucks in ensuring added security of the customer’s private and sensitive data is always an advantage for the contact centers as it allows the customers to trust the contact centers and develops a positive customer-company relationship.