Background

Premier Inn (part of the Whitbread Group) is one of the UK's leading hotel chains and have an extensive network internationally. They are widely spread across the UK and have approximately 72,000 rooms. With 99% of their customers booking directly with the company, their Dunstable-based contact center is their frontline in customer experience. 

Premier Inn has worked with Eckoh for eight years and during that time has regularly renewed the contract to maintain the service across all their brands. 

Challenge

Crucial to their UK and Germany growth and customer service plans was the ability to deliver the highest level of PCI DSS compliant infrastructure in which to host a secure payment solution and an effective way to route calls efficiently. A further requirement was that the infrastructure would be flexible to allow them to scale up, or down, to suit the business peaks and troughs. 

Premier Inn has many customers that contact them while on the move, so, having a speech recognition option for payment and booking was considered a key requirement. They were seeking a provider who could deliver a service that would enable customers to book and cancel rooms at any of their hotels throughout the UK. 

Solution

Eckoh provided a fully PCI DSS compliant speech-enabled reservations and cancellations service to the Premier Inn's hotel brands. 

CallGuard enables customers to provide card payment details to a contact center agent securely over the phone without those details being seen, heard or transferred into the contact center environment or any call recordings.  

The automated booking services were implemented first and were followed by the CallGuard solution to secure customer card payments made over the telephone with a contact center agent. 

Eckoh's expertise in contact center technology solutions also enabled Premier Inn to improve the management of their non-geographic numbers to overcome the complexities of operating and reporting on such a large volume of inbound phone numbers. 

"We have been working with Eckoh for over 8 years now and we're extremely happy. As such we've decided to use the services to secure payment in new territories, such as Germany, to ensure we secure all our clients' cardholder data without discriminating territories or new brands that we launch. Eckoh brings a great deal of expertise in the complex area of PCI DSS compliance and network management and as a trusted supplier, they were the natural choice for us." -Head of Operations 

Value

Premier Inn can more easily comply with PCI DSS while also reducing the risk of fraud and providing more reassurance to its customers. 

The solution's flexibility enables the implementation of a cost-effective solution while they continue to expand the booking and payment services within the contact center. 

Customers can now book and cancel rooms from any of their hotels in the UK. 

Value

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, please contact one of our trusted advisors. 

Key Outcomes