Pelican Business

Pelican Business Services is an award-winning provider of integrated business services.

Profile

Industry: Business Services Employees: 387 Transactions: 75,000

Business: Business services company that manages metering, billing and collections for two major water companies.

Challenge: To achieve and maintain PCI DSS compliance to reduce the risk of fraud and the impact of data breaches.

Solution: CallGuard Hosted for agent-assisted payments.

Benefit:

• Contact center de-scoped from PCI DSS audit
• Customers can pay via an agent or self-service
• No customer data is seen, heard, recorded or stored by the business

Background

Pelican Business Services is an award-winning provider of integrated business services. They are owned by two major water utility companies and was established as a joint venture to manage all their metering, billing and collection operations. It also served as a point of contact for all non-operational customer inquiries.

They operate one Bristol, UK-based contact center with 120 agents who handle a variety of inquiry types many of which result in taking a telephone payment from a wide range of customers from students to the elderly.

Challenge

As a professional organization, taking card payments, they were required to be compliant with the Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard (PCI DSS) which is required by the major card companies in order to continue taking these payments and avoid heavy fines in the event that sensitive data was breached.

Contact center agents were asking their customers to read out their card details over the phone so that they could be entered manually into the payment system. This exposed the customer's data to the potential for theft and fraud — a situation that Pelican wanted to eliminate.

Solution

Eckoh implemented its patented CallGuard solution which completely removes their contact center from the scope of the PCI DSS audit. This simplifies the whole compliance process for Pelican and significantly reduces the risk of fraud and the impact of a data breach.

With their commitment to delivering excellent customer service, Pelican is also able to demonstrate to its customers that their payments are taken securely.

With Eckoh's CallGuard solution we're proud to show that we take our customers' data security seriously. Now, our contact center is PCI DSS compliant and the compliance burden, along with the risk, has been significantly reduced.

Pelican Business

Value

• Agents can stay in contact with the customer throughout the call
• Reduced risk of fraud and burden of PCI DSS compliance by de-scoping the contact center
• Easy for contact center agents to use
• Offering secure payments via agent or self-service to ensure that no customers are disadvantaged
• 75,000 secure payment transactions made between January to September 2018

Looking Forward

As a solution unique to Eckoh, we recognize that this example is likely a challenge many other enterprise organizations struggle with when they begin tackling payment security within their contact centers. Some organizations may even feel like their only option is to either deploy hardware on-premise – likely disrupting long-term cloud transformation strategies – or only achieve partial PCI DSS de-scoping.

As a result, the methodology innovated for The Client is now part of the Eckoh architecture. In fact, multiple other clients have also taken advantage of this solution, allowing them to maintain their existing telephony architecture while maintaining the strictest possible standard for payment security.

To learn more about how Eckoh secures payments across all engagement channels, reach out to one of our trusted advisors.