Revolutionizing Contact Centers: Payment Security and CX with Vonage and PCI Pal

Written by

Vincent Levalois

Published on

March 9, 2023

Read time

7.3 min

Maintaining PCI Compliance with Vonage

As customer expectations continue to grow, more organizations are turning to contact centers as a means to boost customer retention and revenue growth. However, the challenge for companies is to find ways to blend customer experience (CX) with securing customer payments. Let’s take a closer look at how to tackle this challenge.

The Challenge

With multi-channel contact being the norm in the contact center space, companies require a robust payment and compliance strategy to provide seamless payment solutions that can alleviate friction and improve the customer experience.

For organizations, this blend of security and CX is now a critical element of their operations. To stay competitive, it is necessary to serve their customer base and develop contact center opportunities.

Vonage, a long-standing, integrated partner of PCI Pal, offers market-leading 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).

At the point of payment, PCI Pal’s patented technology integrates with the call flow and intercepts any keypad tones or speech from the customer. This keeps the contact center agent from hearing or seeing the card data, ensuring the customer’s sensitive card data – the PAN and the CSV – are prevented from reaching the agent or the organization, thereby drastically reducing the scope of PCI compliance.

Moreover, the integration is seamless, so agents don’t need to switch between screens, enabling them to provide a high standard of customer experience effortlessly.

PCI Pal Digital allows organizations to 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 improve the agent, customer, and business experience drastically. By placing their customers’ data security at the forefront, companies have established a competitive CX edge, while future-proofing their businesses.

In addition, organizations 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 can 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 personally identifiable information (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.

Final Thoughts

The importance of customer experience and data security cannot be understated in today’s contact center landscape. Finding the right balance between these two elements can be a challenging task, but with the right tools and solutions, it is possible to achieve a seamless and secure payment process that improves the overall customer experience.

By leveraging the Vonage and PCI Pal partnership, organizations can provide their customers with a seamless and secure payment experience while also enhancing the customer experience. With the ability to handle payments through multiple channels and without exposing sensitive data to agents or infrastructure, businesses can improve payment success rates, reduce call handling times, and establish a competitive CX edge. By future-proofing your business with these innovative solutions, your contact center can become a more customer-focused part of your organization, driving growth and revenue in the process.

Call AmeriTel today at (818) 734-7400 and one of our expert representatives will provide a path to a quote for Vonage’s services. Our tenure in the business is second to none and we have strong relationships with all carriers to help you get the most out of your search for the right solution.

Share This Article

Latest Articles

Go to Top