Background

Maintel is a leading provider of enterprise communication services including hosted contact center and unified communication solutions including ICON - their hosted communications platform that serves 10s of thousands of enterprise users across industry sectors. Eckoh has a strong strategic partnership with Maintel providing secure payment solutions through the ICON platform to Maintel's customers.

Founded in 1991, Maintel became AIM listed in 2004. They have grown significantly over the years and now have a global footprint and capabilities to support their 7,000 customers.

Operating across eight locations in the UK and Ireland, their team of over 600 people has been by the acquisitions that complement the core proposition.

Challenge

As a provider of contact center solutions, the issue of secure payments and Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard (PCI DSS) compliance became a key issue for Maintel to address in the fight against payment card fraud. Maintel recognized that payment security was not part of their core skills base and so sought a partner to provide this specialist service and solutions. They required a company that had a PCI DSS-compliant solution for both agent-assisted or self-service IVR secure payments.

To ensure the most robust approach to tackling the payment security and compliance challenges, Maintel preferred to remove their entire contact center from the scope of the PCI DSS audit.

Solution

Eckoh's CallGuard secures agent-assisted telephone payments, while EckohPAY secures any self-service IVR payments. CallGuard ensures that while cardholder data remains isolated from the contact center environment, the agent and caller can continue the dialogue, providing a seamless client experience.

EckohPAY can secure payments for telephone, web, SMS or smartphones. The caller can choose to interact with the service using speech recognition or touch-tone via their telephone keypad.

Each of these solutions removes the contact center from the scope of PCI DSS because, as sensitive data is prevented from entering the contact center environment, there is nothing there for a criminal to steal.

Jointly, Eckoh and Maintel have three customers and several about to come on board.

Value

• Provide their clients with PCI DSS-compliant payments that have no impact on existing customer payment applications.
• Deliver automated payment solutions to their clients who can be 'always open' - increasing their revenues and providing end users with a choice of convenient payment solutions.
• Offer the whole range of Eckoh's secure payment and customer engagement solutions that are delivered via the Eckoh Experience Portal, which allows their clients to enhance their customer experience
• New and existing customers can quickly be set up with Eckoh's solutions via the ICON platform

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 Maintel 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 improves customer journeys across all engagement channels, please reach out to one of our trusted advisors. 

Key Outcomes