Contact centers stay secure with Eckoh's CallGuard Remote and ChatGuard

Contact centers that take payments and are using home-working agents during the COVID-19 crisis, have found a way to stay open by using CallGuard Remote to secure phone payments and ChatGuard for web chat payments.

Since the start of the COVID-19 crisis, organizations across all sectors have faced a tough challenge - how to continue serving their customers to the same standard, when their customer service representatives are based at a remote or home-working location. The need to meet this challenge has led to a surge in orders and interest for Eckoh's patented CallGuard Remote solution, which allows them to carry on taking payments over the phone securely.

CallGuard Remote has been available for over three years, tried and tested by organizations in sectors such as utilities, retail, insurance and financial services that need a more flexible way to guarantee security, wherever they base their staff. Developed and used within Eckoh's own PCI DSS compliant contact center, the solution is quick to install and can easily be enhanced to extend to a premised location at any time. This gives businesses a short, medium and long-term strategy for coping with any situation.

In addition to the phone channel, the extraordinary lockdown situation has also driven demand for other agent-assisted digital channels to be operated from home, such as web chat. While in a web chat conversation, agents may offer customers a link to a separate payment page to complete a transaction. However, Eckoh's ChatGuard makes the experience seamless by providing a secure and compliant payment form within the chat conversation itself. This means the customer can pay and continue the conversation without distraction, thereby also maximizing sales.

"The trend for home-working has been growing steadily over recent years but the recent crisis has seen a sudden rise in mobilization to this way of working which has caused this upswing." said Nik Philpot, CEO of Eckoh.

"In these challenging times, businesses want to retain great customer service and keep commerce flowing but they can't compromise on security; and controls have to be watertight. Deploying quickly shouldn't mean organizations need to take risks with security, so we're really happy that we've been able to assist businesses in a short timeframe with CallGuard Remote and ChatGuard to continue to trade securely with a proven product, and one that we ourselves use."