Propane Gas Company

Largest propane gas company in the US operating two data centers, one contact center and 2,500 distribution centers.

Profile

Industry: Oil & Energy Employees: 8,500 Revenue: $2.38 billion

Background: Largest propane gas company in the US operating two data centers, one contact center and 2,500 distribution centers

Challenge: De-scoping parts of the contact center to ease the burden of PCI DSS compliance and ensure the security of customer payments

Solution: CallGuard, including patented Audio Tokenization technology

Benefit:

• De-scoping of agents, recordings and VOIP
• Agents stay in contact throughout
• No system changes or integration
• Nothing for criminals to steal

Background

A propane gas company that provides propane delivery, tank installation, and more for your home or business.

Challenge

Given the size of the customer base and the volume of card payments made through their contact centers, it was important for the company to be able to demonstrate that its security-minded approach to business extended to its customers' sensitive payment card data as well.

As such, it needed to achieve compliance with the Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard (PCI DSS) which is required by the card companies in order to store, transmit or process payment card data. This put the propane gas company in the position of needing to achieve PCI DSS compliance quickly to make up for lost time.

Due to the rigors of compliance with PCI DSS, the organization wanted to remove their calls, call recordings and VOIP network for their data centers, distribution centers and contact center from the scope of the audit. Recognizing that this was not their primary business focus, they sought to harness the expertise of a market-leading secure payment provider. Their stated mission is to be America's safest and most reliable propane company and they wanted to extend this to securing their clients' payment data.

Solution

Eckoh's solution involved the implementation of its patented CallGuard solution because it is the simplest and most secure solution available on the market today. It allows the company to take cardholder data securely over the phone without changing their systems or processes.

When a customer keys in their card details using their phone's keypad, this generates audio tones (DTMF digits) which match the card number. The audio tokenization instantly replaces these tones with different tones to create placeholder data. This is then entered into the agent's payment screen. As the placeholder data is not real card information it can be stored safely and is meaningless to anyone trying to steal it.

CallGuard Audio Tokenization is extremely easy to implement as it does not involve complex integrations or changes to databases, processes or security systems.

Eckoh replaced the organizations' Point-to-Point Encryption (P2PE) devices with a secure payment solution that removes more of the burden of PCI DSS compliance.

Value

"One of our core values is to deliver the safest and most dependable service, and that goes for our customer payments too. That's why we wanted a secure payment solution that would really work, was easy to install and is simple to run. We found it with Eckoh CallGuard".

• De-scoping of agents, call recordings and VOIP network.
• Reduces the impact of a data breach as no meaningful data is stored
• No system changes or complex integration
• Agents can stay in contact with the customer throughout the call
• Replaced their P2PE terminals (point to point encryption terminals)
• AmeriGas agents now have a friendly, easy and secure solution

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.