Telecoms Provider

This Fortune 500 company is an American telecommunications company with HQ in Wisconsin and is the seventh-largest local exchange carrier in the U.S.

Profile

Industry: Telecommunications Employees: 9,600 Revenue: $1.3 billion

Background: Fortune 500 telecoms company providing services across the US

Challenge: Securing payments through their contact center and achieving PCI DSS compliance

Solution: CallGuard secure payment solution

Benefit:

• Speedy implementation
• The flexibility of the solution to accommodate growth
• Demonstrated significant improvement to PCI DSS auditors
• No disruption to the business as the solution works with all existing systems

Background

This Fortune 500 company is an American telecommunications company with headquarters in Madison, Wisconsin and is the seventh-largest local exchange carrier in the U.S. They provide high-speed internet, TV packages and phone services to around 6 million customers in around a hundred rural, suburban and metropolitan communities across the US, and have been doing so since 1969.

Challenge

As the company's contact center takes payments over the phone for its telecoms services, it falls under the scope of the Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard (PCI DSS). They had both IVR and live agent payments which needed to be compliant and secure to reassure customers of their commitment to keeping their sensitive data protected.

They sought a provider who could deliver a simple, effective solution that would be flexible to scale up, or down, with its business needs.

Solution

Eckoh was able to streamline their operations by switching the contact center from an agent fee to a transaction-based model. This worked well for the company as they wanted to prioritize the removal of their IVR credit card and ACH payments from the scope of the PCI DSS audit. Having met this initial objective, Eckoh then implemented its CallGuard solution which removes those live agents from the scope of the audit.

Audio appliances, firewalls and telephony kits were installed at their main data center and telephony ingress point in Madison, WI to cover the minimum of 48,000 monthly transactions but with room to grow.

The company chose Eckoh and CallGuard because it was clear that Eckoh has a track record of being able to implement the solution and simply.

A flexible solution to securing payments for both IVR and live agents means that a business is free to grow and respond to customer and market demands. Achieving and maintaining PCI DSS compliance is also critical.

Value

• Speedy implementation
• The flexibility of the solution to accommodate growth
• Demonstrated significant improvement to PCI DSS auditors
• No disruption to the business as the solution works with all existing systems

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.